Grant Information: NSF Award # 2024837

This international interdisciplinary workshop focuses on the theme of Creative Movements and the Brain. The goal of the workshop is to facilitate a dialogue between science and dance and instigate totally new ideas and ways of thinking that would act as a catalyst for new research directions and creative approaches that would have been difficult to conceive of otherwise. The workshop will address this topic from the twin perspectives of the artist and the scientist. Participants thus will include dancers, choreographers, neuroscientists, neurologists, roboticists, engineers, kinesiologists, dance therapists, and students from those disciplines. Talks and Performances will be organized in seven tracks:

• Session 1: Anthropological and Evolutionary Biology of Creative Movement – Nicky Clayton (Cambridge University) 
• Session 2: Cognitive Neuroscience of Creative Movement – Aga Burzynska (Colorado State University) 
• Session 3: AI, Robotics, Technology and Creative movement – Jose ‘Pepe’ Contreras-Vidal (University of Houston) 
• Session 4: Creative Movement for Health – Citlali Lopez-Ortiz (UI Urbana-Champaign) 
• Session 5: Embodied Cognition and Learning of Creative Movement – Kate Stevens (Western Sydney University) 
• Session 6: The Shared Experience of Creative Movement: Improvisation, Synchronicity, and Creative Child Education – Asaf Bachrach (CNRS) 
• Session 7: Dance Performance in Conversation with Music and Neuroscience and Educational Outreach at Wolf Trap – Jose ‘Pepe’ Contreras-Vidal (University of Houston) & Shihab Shamma (University of Maryland)

We have an offer from the npj Science of Learning Journal to have a dedicated issue that contains a subset of the workshop talks. The journal is "an online open access peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing papers on all research areas related to how the brain learns." For further information, please click here.