Lisa Naugle

Lisa Marie Naugle is a choreographer and scholar who shaped the practice of networked live dance and opened pathways between contemporary choreography and interactive media. She earned both an MFA and a PhD in dance from New York University, completing her doctorate in education in 2001, and became a professor of dance at the University of California, Irvine, where she has also served as department chair.

In the late 1990s, Naugle began creating performance across geographically separated sites. Her 1997 *Cassandra Project* used live network connections to place remote participants inside one choreographic event, treating transmission delay, framing, and divided location as structural elements of the dance rather than obstacles to overcome. This practice deepened through works including *Voyage of Aeneas: FIXED/NOT*, *Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope*, and *Janus/Ghost Stories*, which integrated dance, music, and interactive video across sites in the United States and Canada.

In 2002, Naugle published "Distributed Choreography: A Video-Conferencing Environment" in *PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art*, giving both a name and a conceptual framework to this emerging field. The article examined *Ghost Stories*, a networked performance in which live dance and manipulated video joined activity in separate locations. Around the same period, she collaborated on research using three-dimensional motion capture to analyze gesture, generate animation, and connect bodily movement with sound. In 2009 she founded DTM²—Dance, Theatre, Music, and Media—an improvisation ensemble built around interdisciplinary collaboration that subsequently performed internationally.

Naugle has woven together media research, concert choreography, and pedagogy throughout her career. In 2014, working with John Crawford, she brought UCI students to Rome for collaborative performances involving choreography, music, and video at MACRO and the Conservatory of Santa Cecilia. In 2016–17 she served as an Overseas Master Teacher Artist for Shanghai University and presented work at the Shanghai International Dance Center. More recent projects have continued to move between live, screen, and distributed forms, including *Parallel Worlds* (2021), which incorporated film, remote voices, and action-poetry text with UCI dancers. Her research now also brings psychoanalytic inquiry into conversation with somatic practice, choreography, and improvisation.