Norah Zuniga Shaw
Livable Futures Artistic Director and Co-Creator
Founder, Norah Zuniga Shaw, co-created Livable Futures and currently leads the project. Her own projects center on performance as a response to ecological crisis and new forms of facilitating, teaching and learning that support intention and spark action.
Professor and Director of Dance and Technology Contact: zuniga-shaw dot 1 at osu dot edu
Pronouns: She/They
Biography
With a background in choreography and environmental science, I am an interdisciplinary artist working in a blend of mediums and genres from live sound and movement performance, to data visualization, film, interactive media installations, virtual reality, writing, artist walks and participatory theater. At heart, I am deeply interdisciplinary and find that my best work involves collaboration and the facilitating creative teams.
My influences range from ecological and systems theory to Black feminist thought and the wanderings of the situationists, to the practices of radical inclusion in community dance theater, intercultural, and queer studies, posthumanism, and the aesthetic iterative play of design and architecture.
I present and publish frequently on themes at the intersection of our bodies and our technologies and my artworks have been exhibited at such venues as the Pompidou Center Paris, Sadler's Wells London, Hebbel Theater Berlin, Taipei Arts Festival, Spring Dance Utrecht and the Chicago Humanities Festival and online to millions of viewers.
At Ohio State, I am a Professor of Dance with a joint appointment at the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) where I use feminist and inclusive pedagogical approaches to teach courses in interdisciplinary research and composition, dance improvisation, theories of the body and applied technologies.
Q & A
What makes more livable futures for you?
Love. Engagement. Creative Solutions. Action. Turning toward the stuff that scares me. In 2015 I started bringing climate change into my practices as a choreographer and performer and have co-created several works including Climate Gathering, a performance ritual / public dialog and reckoning helping participants feels into action. Creating performances and contexts for liberatory process. I’m finding adrienne maree brown’s text Emergent Strategy to be exactly what I need as an antidote to current cultural trends. Her call to collaborate as a means of survival is at the heart of Livable Futures as is her emphasis on the importance of embodied and creative practices in social and environmental justice efforts. Livable Futures are green and full of biodiverse life.
What are you reading, viewing, listening to right now?
Right now I’m re-reading Donna Harsway’s Staying with the Trouble and I’m loving sharing Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future by Patty Krawec. I listen to On Being a lot and I read Seth Godin’s blog, I appreciate his ongoing theme of creating in ways that matter to other people, now. As a white woman and daughter of conquest, I am actively working to be a better accomplice, to be accountable, to hold space and listen, and to center blackness, brownness, queerness, and indigenous references and voices in my life. Over the years, this has led me to read every novel I can get my hands on by N.K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler of course, Laura Rendon’s wonderful text, Sentipensante on inclusive pedagogy is always close at hand, as are books by bell hooks and Simone Forti. And I’ve been actively seeking out experiences that serve as antidotes to the misogyny that so permeates the culture in the U.S. I fell in love with a new Joan Jonas' work I saw at the MOMA in 2019 on the arctic and can’t get it out of my head and I keep an eye on Eiko Otake’s work at all times. It is very cool that Jonas and Otake did a project together in 2022. I have a long-term interest in counterpoint, complexity and emergent systems and I have a theory that Fugues might serve as a mindfulness practice to support living in a way that fosters diversity and difference. And I love Sam Green’s piece on Bucky Fuller as a an exemplar in the combined lecture and performance and activism genre. PJ Harvey’s good when I need to rage. In 2020 I’m spending time in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa to listen and absorb and learn from the incredible progressive movement there for indigenous rights, kindness, and well-being and I follow many artists from that region including Jack Gray and Jen Rae.
What practices are sustaining you?
Gaga community dance classes whenever I can get one or free dancing in my living room; singing in the Sonic Arts Ensemble and computer music/sound improvisation rehearsals with my fabulous community of co-creators at ACCAD; reading climate change facts and figures and collaging them into a notebook I have with images of the arctic, ice, artists, polar bears etc to help deal with the grief and fear; reading and viewing and discussing Livable Futures with our leadership team and the wonderful students who join in the Livable Futures Labs and create projects as fellows; walking in the forests and prairies around Columbus with my family; saunas in Germany; learning new languages and cultural perspectives; and watching for Monarch butterflies coming to my little backyard prairie patch. Thank you milkweed! I’ve also started going to protests again, not with any hope of political outcome but for communion. Time alone and time with family and time in community. Honest, open, heartfelt communication.