Karen Barbour is an Associate Professor, dance researcher, educator and artist based in Te Kura Toi School of Arts at The University of Waikato in New Zealand. Her research is based in choreographic practice with a focus on feminist choreography, site dance, digital dance and collaboration. Phenomenological and feminist perspectives frame her work and autoethnographic and narrative writing approaches mesh with embodied and moving image representations. Karen is very active in the global south contemporary ethnography community and invested in understanding place and socio-cultural context in relation to dance and identity. Karen's recent professional choreographic work has featured in theatre and site-specific contexts in New Zealand, including in the annual Hamilton Gardens Arts Festival and her digital dance work has been shown in Berlin, the United States, Norway, Russia and New Zealand. Her most recent book was co-written with Vicky Hunter and Melanie Kloetzel (Re)positioning Site dance: Local acts, global perspectives (Barbour, Hunter & Kloetzel, 2019). Other writing has been published in Emotion, Space and Society, Dance Research Aotearoa, Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, and her monograph;Dancing across the page: Narrative and embodied ways of knowing (2011) is available through Intellect Books.
