Karen Schaffman, Ph.D.

Dance, VPA Department

Chair, Arts & Lectures

karen dancing

Karen Schaffman, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Dance at Cal State San Marcos where she enjoys working in an interdisciplinary environment and fostering collaborative projects. She earned her Ph.D. from University of California, Riverside, basing her research on contact improvisation in relation to choreographic analysis, identity politics, and cultural studies. Her writing has been published in Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (2003, Wesleyan Press), and she is currently moving her dissertation to book form. She has been on the faculty of TuT (Hannover, Germany) and UC Davis, and teaches at numerous improvisational festivals internationally. In 1994, she co-founded Lower Left, a teaching and performance collective known for bringing postmodern dance perspectives to San Diego where until 2006 she was seminal in creating projects and community initiatives. In 2003, she embarked on Downstream, a collaborative new media-based performance collective.  Currently she works with the Veronika Blumstein Project, an international collective based in Germany; collaborates with Kristine Diekman on United & Severed to create media installations concerning women and traumatic injury; and performs and practices with local San Diego dance artists. 


Links
Downstream

Lower Left

United & Severed

Office: ARTS 307
(760) 750-8009
kschaffm@csusm.edu



Arts & Lectures