About
Shannon Woods, PhD (she/her) is a dance artist, writer, and scholar whose work bridges dance & performance studies, American studies, and carceral studies. She holds a PhD in Theatre, History, and Criticism, with an emphasis in Performance as Public Practice, from The University of Texas at Austin (2025), where she also completed a portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies. She earned her MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts (2019) and dual undergraduate degrees—a BA in English and World Literatures and a BFA in Dance, Ballet Concentration—from Marymount Manhattan College (2015), both magna cum laude.
As a researcher in dance and performance studies, Woods examines the intersections of choreography, public safety, and the police state. Her current work theorizes “performances of protection” and the choreographic dimensions of crisis, threat, and national identity. Her peer-reviewed publications appear in Theatre Journal and Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, and she is a contributing author in the forthcoming bilingual feminist anthology Mosaico feminista/Feminist Mosaic (Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, 2025). She is the recipient of the College of Fine Arts Graduate School Academic Excellence Fellowship and the University Graduate Continuing Fellowship and was named a Provost’s Early Career Scholar Postdoctoral Fellow in 2024.
Woods is also an experienced educator and has taught dance and cultural history courses at UT Austin. She was the first graduate student invited to co-teach Dance History I: Dance is/as Culture for majors and later served as lead instructor for Dance, Identity, and Cultural Expression, a university-wide course that explores the politics of embodiment, identity, and movement. In her teaching, she brings a critical perspective shaped by her scholarly and artistic practices.
Her creative practice includes dramaturgy, choreography, and collaborative devising. She served as co-dramaturg and co-choreographer for kin • song: ode to disability ancestors (Fall 2021) and dramaturg for the 2021 Cohen New Works Festival. She has performed professionally with WorkHorse Dance Project and DeFunes Dance in New York, appearing in works presented at Dixon Place, Center for Performance Research, Mark Morris Dance Center, and the Battery Dance Festival, among others.
From 2015 to 2021, Woods worked as a research editor for DanceMedia’s publications (Dance Magazine, Pointe, Dance Teacher, and Dance Spirit) and was a regular contributor to Dance Magazine, where she was the first writer to regularly contribute to “The Conversation,” a monthly section that appeared both online and in print. Her editorial and journalistic work focused on discussions of race, body image, mental wellness, and social activism in the dance industry. Committed to public humanities and arts-based community research, Woods was also a PhD Career Pathways Fellow with Texas Folklife from 2022 to 2023, where she served as Special Programs Convener and helped launch the Creole & Zydeco Cultural Convening in Texas and Louisiana, a NEA-funded cultural preservation initiative.
Across her scholarly, creative, and editorial work, Woods is guided by questions of how bodies carry, contest, and survive systems of policing and surveillance. Her research explores how choreography works to mitigate risk and crisis, and what performances of protection can tell us about nationalism, citizenship, and cultural systems of protection. Through writing, teaching, and making, she continues to investigate the embodied politics of protection, memory, and resistance.