Zena Bibler is an artist-scholar working at the intersection of dance studies, choreography, and social practice. She engages dance as a mode of asking questions about the world—one can reveal insights not accessible by other means. She completed an MA in Performance Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. 

As an educator, Zena specializes in integrating “critical moving” as an essential part of critical thinking. She has been recognized by the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award and Collegium of University Teaching Fellows, and was named a Champion for Student Success at the University of Iowa. In her technique classes, she is currently developing an approach to floorwork and partnering techniques informed by contact improvisation, capoeira, release technique, partnered social dances, and consent and care practices.

Zena’s current scholarship examines how dancers cultivate specialized modes of attention as part of their technical training, choreography, and social activism. In her second major project, she is developing a counter-history of site-specific dance that proposes that all performances are inescapably entangled with place-based relationships. Past writing projects have explored topics ranging from human-avatar embodiment in Grand Theft Auto, interspecies collaboration, and improvisational care practices. These and others have been published in Dance Research Journal, Imagined Theatres, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Contact Quarterly, and the LA-based performance blog, Riting. 

As a choreographer, Zena works principally through the method of devising, crafting layered improvisational scores in collaboration with the performers that encourage choice-making and problem solving in real time. Her dances and participatory events have been presented domestically and internationally at venues such as Pieter Performance Space, The New Museum, HomeLA, Movement Research at the Judson Church, NADA Hudson, Lublin International Dance Theatres Festival (Poland), Museum Perron Oost (The Netherlands), Cairo Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (Egypt), and SESC Villa Mariana (Brazil). From 2012-2016, Zena was co-founder and co-curator of Fleet Moves, a community-specific dance festival in Wellfleet, MA. 

Collaboration and exchange with other artists have shaped the trajectory of Zena’s work. Some formative collaborators and teachers include Katie Baer Schetlick, mayfield brooks, Anya Cloud, Jeanine Durning, Levi Gonzalez, Ishmael Houston-Jones, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance (iLAND), Athena Kokoronis, Hannah Krafcik, Nia Love, Darrian O’Reilly, Gwynn Shanks, Nancy Stark Smith, Brandin Steffensen, Andrew Suseno, Lailye Weidman, and devika wickremesinghe, and students and colleagues at UCLA and the University of Iowa.

Research Interests:

• Critical Dance Studies
• Improvisation 
• Relationality
• Care Practices
• Site-Specific & Ecological Performance
• Attention, Perception, and Mindfulness

Courses:

• Dance and Society in Global Contexts
• Performing Power, Performing Protest
• Western Concert Dance History 
• Contemporary Movement Practices
• Introduction to Improvisation & Composition
• Graduate Improvisation II
• Choreography