la compagnia
Renata Sheppard
2016 - in house
coreographer
Renata Sheppard is a multi media artist who has lived and worked in the US, Europe, and Asia. As a Fulbright Scholar, Henry Luce Scholar, Kate Neal Kinley Fellow, and US Embassy Artist Research grantee, she has been recognized for her innovative engagement of dance across discipline: creating works for stage, screen and site specific performance.
Her work investigates interdisciplinary and innovative methods of art-making, engagement and digital technologies, including a diverse range of media: dance, film, photography, social media, crowd-sourcing and participation, installation, performance, video, sound and interactive design. She is a performer, choreographer and certified Laban Movement Analyst. She uses elements of body, architecture, materials, light, projection, and sound in her choreographic “living sculptures” which often happen in unexpected, site specific locations or on the screen. She continues to pioneer the way that dance and body intelligence intersect with research, social media, human behavior and public interactives.
She has presented her work and research internationally in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, United Kingdom, Tunisia, India, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Canada, and throughout the US. She has been invited for choreographic residencies and lectures at the New School of Media in New York, Culture Hub NYC, Bogliasco Foundation Italy, DanceBridge Chicago, Links Hall Chicago, Dance Omi, Summer Stages Dance, Planet Arts Exchange in Liverpool, Kolkata, and Tunisia, Chinese Culture University in Taiwan, Taiwan National University of the Arts, Seoul Institute of the Arts and European Video Dance Heritage project in Spain at the Reina Sofia Museum.
She is the recipient of numerous awards, nominations and grants across disciplinary domains: including the Lemelson-Illinois Technology Innovation award while a graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship. In Chicago, she has been a Links Hall Residency artist and a Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs DanceBridge Residency artist, presenting her works at the Building Stage, Dumbo Dance Festival New York, Summer Stages Dance, and as a selected artist for the Dance Omi Residency in New York. As a Henry Luce Scholar she spent a year living and working in Taipei where she taught at the Taipei National University of the Arts under the direction of Yunyu Wang. As a Henry Luce Scholar in Taiwan, she also guest taught at the Chinese Culture University and was commissioned to create a new work for Body Expression Dance Company which premiered at the Avant Garde Guling Street Theatre in Taipei. In Italy, the US Embassy granted her funding to extend her Fulbright Fellowship and thus collaborate with Lumiq Studios and Virtual Reality and Multi Media Park to create an evening-length interactive dance, FraMESHift, which premiered at Teatro Astra, Torino, during the Teatro a Corte’s Summer Festival in 2012. She has engaged in performance collaborations in India through Banglanatok Dot Com Theatre and in Tunisia at the Mediterranean Cultural Center for Music in Sidi-Bou Said, both through Planet Arts eXchange under the direction of Lotfi Kaabi. She has presented her academic research in tele-immersion environments under the direction of internationally-known computer scientist, Klara Nahrstedt (in collaboration with Ruzena Bajcsy) and movement/body-centered interactive design and human-computer interaction at international conferences through the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) in Canada, Germany, Australia and the USA.
She currently resides between the United States and Italy where she is working on Experimental Film Virginia (USA), Campo Largo (IT) as well as teaching and creating commissions multi-disciplinary works for stage, screen and site.