Dr. Chi-Fang Chao
Dr. Chi-Fang Chao specialises in dance anthropology and dance ethnography. She has studied dance cultures in several Asian regions, such as Taiwan, Okinawa and the latter’s diaspora communities. Her major research interests include ritual, spirituality and embodiment, and indigenous dance theatre in the post-colonial era.
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/chi-fang-chao
Dr. Nicola Conibere
Nicola Conibere is a choreographer and academic. Her research uses choreographic practices to explore the potentials of how bodyminds relate. She is interested in the politics of performance and the potentials of spectatorial exchange: her work often investigates theatricality, public appearing and social choreography. She is currently researching notions of excess and the body, particularly in relation to crip choreographic practices. Her recent work Carareretetatakakekerers was shown at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 2021. She makes works for stages, art galleries and other civic spaces, and has presented at venues including Hayward Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, Tramway, Dance House Helsinki, International Biennial of Sydney.
Nicola joined Roehampton as a Senior Lecturer in Dance in 2018. She is Programme Leader for the MFA Choreography and the MRes Choreography and Performance. She teaches across postgraduate programmes and supervises multiple PhDs, with expertise in Practice-as-Research. Nic has organised multiple research seminars and artist workshops at Roehampton and works in partnerships with dance organisations, recently including Independent Dance, Dance Art Foundation and Sadler’s Wells. She is an AHRC Peer Reviewer and Fellow of the HEA. She gained her PhD from Trinity Laban (City University) in 2014 and previously worked at institutions including Coventry University and Trinity Laban. Nicola is part of CRICA (Consortium for Researching Inclusive Cultures in the Arts) a doctoral training programme in partnership with LSE (London School of Economics).
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/nicola-conibere
Hanna Gillgren
Hanna Gillgren (SE) is choreographer and curator for H2DANCE and Fest en Fest an artist-run festival for expanded choreography for UK and Nordic-based choreographers. She is part of the inaugural artistic cohort at Rose Choreographic School Sadler’s Wells East London (2024-26).
Hanna has choreographed and taught to a variety of ages and abilities both in a professional and academic context since 1998.
Together with choreographer Heidi Rustgaard (NO) she formed H2DANCE in 2000, and has since made trans-disciplinary works, working primarily between Norway, Sweden and the UK.
She was associate artist at the Place London 2001/02.
Hanna has an ongoing fascination with meetings of differences, exploring ways in which we negotiate hierarchies and conformity. Her research explores voice, movement, language and the choreography of hosting and facilitating.
Hanna has delivered commissions for Norrdans SE, Victoria and Albert Museum for BIGDance London, Womens Playright Trust and Jerwood Foundation.
She has taken part in research projects with Jonathan Burrows, Guy Dartnell, Meg Stuart and Guy Cools.
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/hanna-gillgren
Prizes
2013: ThePlacePrize for Dance – audience vote in the finals
2005: IMZ Dance on Screen Award - GOLD
Professor Sara Houston
Sara is an award winning researcher and teacher. She won the BUPA Foundation Prize in 2011 for her pioneering work in dance and Parkinson’s. In 2014 she was a Finalist in the National Public Engagement Awards for her work engaging the general public in her Parkinson’s and dance research. She is sought after globally as a speaker in community dance and published the monograph Dancing with Parkinson’s in 2019. Sara also won a prestigious National Teaching Fellowship in 2014 for excellence in learning and teaching. Sara works across EU/UK with dance organisations and dance artists to augment professional development through soft skills and for creative health. She was one of the lead authors of the open access Soft Skills in Dance: A Guidebook to Enhance your Practice, funded by Erasmus+. She is passionate about socially engaged dance and about acknowledging the richness of dancing for non-professionals.
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/sara-houston
https://www.intellectbooks.com/dancing-with-parkinsons
http://empowering2.communicatingdance.eu/guidebook/en/
Professor Alexandra Kolb
Alexandra has lectured at universities and conservatoires in the UK and internationally, following her Ph.D. from Cambridge University. She draws on a background in Literature, Art History and Philosophy alongside Dance and Theatre to convey to her students a sense of the dance field’s breadth and its many overlaps with other artistic and scholarly developments, as well as the diversity of international dance forms and styles.
Her prize-winning research concerns the manifold cross-connections between Dance and Politics. Radically interdisciplinary like her teaching, it engages with other academic and artistic fields, foremost among them philosophy, theatre, literature, occasionally sociology and more recently the visual arts and sciences.
She has published over seventy outputs, including numerous scholarly articles and three books: Performing Femininity: Dance and Literature in German Modernism (2009), Dance and Politics (2011), and Dancing Europe: Identities, Languages, Institutions (2022) with Nicole Haitzinger. Her prizes include the Gertrude Lippincott Award, Marlis Thiersch Prize and a Harry Ransom Fellowship.
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/alexandra-kolb
Lalitaraja
Lalitaraja (Joachim Chandler MA) is a dance artist, educator and Feldenkrais practitioner based in the dance department at Roehampton University where he teaches choreography, contact improvisation and improvisation. As a performer he has worked with Scottish Ballet, Michael Clark, Adventures in Motion Pictures, Laurie Booth, Yolande Snaith and Charles Linehan among others. He has presented more than 25 choreographic works and continues to choreograph and perform. His research interests focus on contemplative practices, improvisation and choreography. His meditation journey began to develop during his twenties eventually teaching meditation and Buddhism regularly. The name Lalitaraja was given on ordination into the Triratna Buddhist Order 1998.
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/lalitaraja-chandler
Dr. Heike Salzer
Heike Salzer is a German dancer and artist-scholar. She fluidly moves between performance, choreography, and site specific screendance. In 2014 she founded WECreate Productions together with Ana Baer Carrilllo (US/MX) jointly directing award winning screendances, installations and multi-media performances that have been encountered by thousands of audiences in Asia, Europe, Middle East and the Americas. She serves on the board and team of curators of the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema (US) and is a member of the international DEED-Designing Embodied Education in Dance Network. She has multiple publications.
Heike has been invited internationally for arts residencies, masterclasses and short courses and taught in Higher Education in the Netherlands, Iceland, Malta, United States, Mexico and the United Kingdom. At Roehampton, she convenes the MFA Dance and Embodied Practice, supervises PhD artistic-research projects and is a researcher at the CRACE-Centre for Research in Arts and Creative Exchange.
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/dr-heike-salzer
Website: www.salts.nl
WECreate Productions instagram: @wecreate.productions
Latent Spaces: https://latentspacesart.com
Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema: https://sanssoucifestival.org
Dr. Tamara Tomić–Vajagić
Dr. Tamara Tomić–Vajagić works across visual culture, digital media, and performance and is a Senior Lecturer in Dance Practices within Roehampton's School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. She teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate degrees as well as researches and supervises doctoral projects on the themes of dance and visual art, mediated choreography, and dance history, aesthetics and performance studies. Her latest publications explore detective-style visual diagrams as choreographic objects in artistic practice (Performance Research: On Diagrams, 2023) and fashion and dance structural interplays in Issey Miyake’s collaboration with William Forsythe (OUP, 2021). Her artistic practice includes collaborative visual art for Art Weekend Belgrade 2021: Hotel Belgrade, and visual essays for Igor and Moreno's book On Andante (2024) and Still Life Zine (2021). Her forthcoming publications include the research chapters about internet-found images as representations of "disco dancing girls" (Disco!, OUP forthcoming) and the material culture in the hybrid fashion-multimedia performances by the Hats Theatre (Belgrade, Serbia 1993-2006) for the project The Museum of 90s, Serbia.
https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/tamara-tomic-vajagic
Mike Toon
Michael Toon trained at the Legat School and Urdang Academy before performing with London City Ballet, Vienna Festival Ballet and as an international freelance soloist. Alongside his stage career he co-founded Capitol Chamber Ballet Project and Heart of the Jester Productions, creating opportunities for collaboration between dancers, musicians and technicians. He also developed a parallel career in technical management and lighting design, working across major venues and international tours with both dance companies and music artists.
Since joining Roehampton University, he has become Senior Lecturer and Technical Manager in the Dance programme, where, following completion of his MA in Education, he introduced the Applied Lighting and Production modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level. His work combines performance, production and education, with current research focusing on collaborations with CoDa Dance Company exploring neurological conditions such as MS.
