Colorado College Drama & Dance Department

Shawn Womack joined the Drama and Dance Department in 2011 as the department chair and as an associate professor of dance after serving for eight years on the faculty at Grinnell College. She has also taught as a guest artist at numerous colleges and universities including University of California, Riverside, the Ohio State University, Iowa State University, University of Cincinnati and Ohio University. Prior to teaching at Grinnell, Shawn founded Shawn Womack Dance Projects, a Cincinnati-based contemporary dance and performance company that performed throughout the United States and in the former Soviet Union. Her choreography for the company was recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council as well as the 1996 Ohio Governor’s award in the category of performing arts. Her choreographic investigations often interlace narrative with ethnographic and historical research to delve into issues of memory, place, and identity. Recent explorations focus on matters of ageism, feminism and dance. Camouflage, performed in its first installation in June 2011 at Cincinnati’s Aronoff Center for the Arts, incorporates video and site explorations to probe the uneasy relationship between aging, feminism and dance. The four women performers identities are both concealed and revealed in the interplay between video imagery with live action. In the past eight years, her work has also been produced at Bryant College, Iowa State University, Des Moines Playhouse, University of California, Los Angeles, Minneapolis’ Southern Theatre, San Diego’s Sushi, and University of California, Riverside. She holds a master of fine arts in dance from the University of California, Riverside.