Renata Sheppard

About Renata

updated 6/2013: Renata Sheppard is an interdisciplinary dance artist with formal training in theatre, music, and visual arts. She creates work for both stage and screen while her research in dance and technology focuses on the design of interactive systems. She began a dialogue between dance and technology while creating experimental Dance for Camera films and working as a researcher/collaborator from 2007-2009 in the Tele-immersive Environments lab at the University of Illinois, Department of Computer Science. There she developed a unique, technology-based dance composition course and presented the Tele-immersive System internationally in Germany, Canada, and throughout the U.S. She recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy at the Virtual Reality and Multi Media Park’s (VR&MMP) Allied Sciences Arts Lab where she remained for a six-month project as Director and Choreographer for an original, interactive dance performance called FraMESHift, which premiered at the 2012 Teatro a Corte Summer Festival. Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), which she studied at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute for Movement Studies in New York, is fundamental to her teaching and choreography and central to her framework for interactive design. Her choreography has been presented throughout the United States and in Italy, Germany, and India, and Taiwan. She has performed in the works of Chamecki/Lerner, Merce Cunningham, and David Parker/Sara Hook among others. Her dance film, The Wait of Gravity, was an official selection at the 2011 San Francisco Dance Film Festival and New York’s SLAM Motion in Media Dance Film Festival among others.
During her time as a Luce Scholar placed at the Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan, she has lectured and guest taught at Chinese Culture University, National Taiwan University, and for the Dance Department and Stage! Technology Series hosted by TNUA’s Performing Technologies Lab where she was a keynote speakerand workshop leader. She was a panel speaker for the Arts and Technology Symposium hosted by the Seoul Institute for the Arts and looks forward to teaching a Dance Film workshop at Rimbun Dahan Art Center in Malaysia in July 2013. She iscurrently spearheading the 2013 Harbor for the Arts Festival’s Dance for theCamera/Experimental Film workshop in Cape Charles, Virginia, in collaboration with the Arts Enter Cape Charles, the town of Cape Charles, and supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant. She hopes to draw from her network of creative, innovative, and experimental artists and thinkers to build an internationally focused summer hub of activity and exchange in the historic, bayside town of Cape Charles.