Biography

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 taught 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. In 2003, she embarked on Downstream, a collaborative new media-based performance collective