Short Bio:

Norah Zuniga Shaw (ZShaw) is an interdisciplinary artist and creative director. Called “wildly creative” by the NYTimes, her work is exhibited worldwide and has won numerous awards and features. Major projects include Livable Futures public practice and podcast, Synchronous Objects (2009) and Degrees of Unison (2010) with William Forsythe and Maria Palazzi, TWO (2013) with Bebe Miller, Dancing Life essay in The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance (2019), and Upwelling (2022) a sonic and visual poem memorializing the early days of the pandemic. She is currently touring two transmedia performance rituals, Climate Gathering and Oasis and editing a Routledge Companion on Performance and Technology with Maaike Bleeker. Since 2004, ZShaw teaches interdisciplinary arts theory and practice and co-founded the Motion Lab for intermedia research and creativity at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design. She performs, publishes, presents and consults internationally on performance + technology topics.

Extended Bio:

Norah Zuniga Shaw (ZShaw) is an artist, writer, and creative director. Her artistic research centers on choreographic knowledge as a locus for interdisciplinary and intercultural creativity. She is internationally recognized for her digital projects and award-winning interdisciplinary collaborations including Synchronous Objects with William Forsythe and TWO with Bebe Miller. Her work has been presented around the world at venues including the Pompidou Center Paris, Taipei Arts Festival, PACT Zollverein Essen, Sadler's Wells London, Hebbel Theater Berlin, Spring Dance Utrecht, BUDA Kortrijk, Wexner Center for the Arts (Wex) Columbus, Kampnagel Hamburg, Cyberarts Boston, Wyoming Gallery NYC, the Chicago Humanities Festival, and online with millions of viewers. 

ZShaw presents frequently on 21^st livability and humane technologies and is currently touring the Livable Futures project including two immersive performances (Climate Gathering and Oasis), radio ballets, and creative public dialogs. Livable Futures is a broad based initiative bringing artists, scholars and public and private sector collaborators together to foster creative solutions for survival under planetary conditions of unpredictability and crisis. She is currently producing a Livable Futures podcast, teaching a new course on the subject Spring 2023. In 2022, ZShaw premiered two new works as part of this project: Upwelling (a 14 min visual and sonic poem assembled from cellphone video and audio messages shared by 27 people living through pandemic lockdowns and the global reckoning with racism on three different continents and in both hemispheres); and OASIS, offering an unexpected site of respite, a living immersive installation for transformative community and creative recovery. Participants are bathed in sound, stars, stories, and sensation as they move and create with the performers. OASIS has received support from the Wex, Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Discovery Themes at Ohio State. ZShaw has developed community workshop bringing interfaith and intercultural communities into the creative community building processes of both works.

Shaw’s digital projects include the multipart Collaboration for Humane Technologies, a series of Pop-Up events producing Virtual/Mixed Reality prototypes for full bodied discovery and open-ended play. Motion Bank: TWO (2013), her collaboration with animator Maria Palazzi and choreographers Bebe Miller (US) and Thomas Hauert (BE/CH), integrates dance data visualization, video, and animation in pursuit of spontaneous motion. TWO follows on the success of Palazzi, Shaw, and William Forsythe’s previous collaboration Synchronous Objects and was created by commission from The Forsythe Company. Synchronous Objects is a screen-based interactive work exploring choreographic counterpoint in a single masterwork by William Forsythe. Launched online and at the Wexner Center for the Arts in 2009, Synchronous Objects has received numerous honors and awards including “Best of Show-Interactive” and the “Judge’s Choice Award” at the Columbus Society for Communicating Arts (CSCA), features in the New York Times and Communication Arts Interactive Annual 16, finalist in the 2009 Adobe MAX Awards, nomination for a Webby Award, and inclusion as a featured work in the SIGGRAPH Information Aesthetics Showcase. In 2010, Shaw was commissioned by Andreas Broeckmann/ISEA RHUR European Cultural Capital to create a large scale video installation Degrees of Unison, based on Synchronous Objects and extending into a three room interactive experience. The installation premiered a PACT Zollverein and was selected by The Goethe Institute as an excellence project, touring internationally for several years to sites in Europe and Asia including the Goethe galleries and festivals in NYC, Bangalore, Tokyo, Zagreb, and Ankara, and the Taipei Arts Festival. Other significant artistic commissions include an interactive sound installation for ICMC Copenhagen with legendary circus artist Jerome Thomas, three dances for television (WOSU-PBS), and performances for NANO at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. And in 2022 she received a commission from the Wexner Center for the Arts to conduct experiments in digital performance including a social media installation. She is a vocalist for the Sonic Arts Ensemble and featured on their recent album from Ravello Records on the track Rising Tide of Light.

ZShaw is a published author on numerous dance and technology topics and was funded by the Battelle Endowment to complete a book/catalog about Synchronous Objects and the new methods in interdisciplinary practice-based research it required. She recently published two chapters in books for Oxford University Press, one on improvisation and climate change called Dancing Life and another on contemporary ballet called Living in Counterpoint. She is currently editing the Routledge Companion on Performance and Technology with Dr. Maaike Bleeker.

ZShaw sits on the editorial board of the Choreographic Practices Journal and on the Advisory Board for the ATLAS Center for arts and engineering at the University of Colorado. She is a co-creator with The Joyce Theater for the Getting Closer to Dance: A Homecoming 2023, a convening for activism and advocacy work in dance including leading a summit for dance and technology leaders in higher education.

Since 2004, ZShaw has been Director for Dance and Technology at The Ohio State University Department of Dance and Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) where she is a Professor and teaches courses in interdisciplinary research and composition, intermedia performance, critical theories of the body, performance and technology, embodied digital literacy, and dance improvisation. She co-founded the Motion Lab at ACCAD and frequently consults with other universities and arts organizations on development of interdisciplinary research and facilities for educational technology innovation.

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