ABOUT

Jennifer Salk is currently most interested in site-responsive work, and collaborating with other artists. Her current project, anfractuous involves collaborators media artist, Martin Jarmick, composer Paul Matthew Moore, and dance artists Imana Gunawan, Natalie Fernandi, Sean O’Bryan and Mike “Majinn” O’Neal. This work is an interactive dance media artwork, exploring the virtual world as a site for exploration.

Jennifer is an associate professor at the University of Washington. She served as the chair of the department for seven years. She received her MFA from Ohio State University and her BFA from the University of Utah. She teaches dance making courses, experiential dance history including a new course entitled “Activating Place” exploring dance performance in places other than theaters, undergraduate and graduate teaching methods, and graduate composition emphasizing collaboration and process rather than product, and involves artists from across campus. The course “Creativity as Research: Experimentation and PLay” is sponsored by the Mellon Foundation and the Arts Divisional Resources at the UW. She co-teaches the course with Afroditi Psarra from Digital Art and Experimental Media, Jeffrey Frace from the School of Drama, Trisha Davis, Chair of Biochemistry, and Vikram Prakash from the School of Architecture.

Jennifer spent seven years in NYC touring and dancing with various choreographers, and was also the artistic director of her own company. Jennifer was an assistant professor in the dance department at the University of South Florida prior to coming to the UW in 2002.

Jennifer has taught master classes and choreographed for companies and schools around the country (ADF, Florida Dance Festival, National High School Dance Festival among others), as well as in Italy, Turkey, Portugal, and Paraguay. She has been recognized for her lively and highly physical technique classes as well as her unique way of teaching choreographic methods to new choreographers, and teaching methods to new dance instructors.

She was on faculty at the Staibdance Summer Dance Intensive in Sorrento, Italy for seven years (2013 -2019), sharing the teaching roster with Batsheva Dance instructor, Gavriel Spitzer and Countertechnique instructors as well. She has performed with Mark Haim in Paris at the ArtDanThe Festival, ADF, the Joyce Theater in NYC, and On the Boards in Seattle. She has presented her research in Experiential Anatomy in Dance Technique, and Embodied Writing Practices (with her collaborator Stephanie Liapis) at national and international conferences. Her DVD, Experiential Anatomy in Dance Technique: Eight Skeletal Explorations which was published in 2010 by Human Kinetics and is now available free to the public on this site! Jennifer is the recipient of the Fulbright Specialist Roster Grant, the Distinguished Teaching Award at UW,the Donald R. Petersen Endowed Fellowship and Professorship, and the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair in the Arts. She is currently a Mellon Faculty Fellow at the UW.