Norah Zuniga Shaw

Norah Zuniga Shaw is an artist-researcher who has shown that choreography can function as both embodied practice and a way of organizing knowledge. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado, in an artistic household and designed her undergraduate study at Hampshire College to join dance and environmental science—a pairing that would shape her entire career. She earned an MFA in dance and intercultural collaboration at UCLA before becoming director for dance and technology at Ohio State University's Department of Dance and Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) in 2004, where she has developed teaching and research across interdisciplinary composition, theories of the body, intermedia performance, improvisation, and digital practice.

Zuniga Shaw's most widely recognized work is *Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced* (2009), created with choreographer William Forsythe, designer Maria Palazzi, The Forsythe Company, and more than thirty researchers. The project translated organizing principles from Forsythe's ensemble choreography into data, animation, visualization, and interactive software—demonstrating that dance structure could function as a form of knowledge useful beyond the stage while remaining rooted in the specificity of the work itself. Rather than replacing the dance with data, the project created multiple entry points into its counterpoint, cueing, and relational architecture.

Zuniga Shaw and Palazzi expanded this research through installations and Motion Bank. *Synchronous Objects: Degrees of Unison* (2010) reimagined the web project spatially, while *TWO* (2013) examined improvisational strategies associated with choreographers Bebe Miller and Thomas Hauert, making those working methods accessible through digital scores. Both projects treated choreography as a thinking practice that could be distributed and studied across different media and contexts.

Her practice has since brought embodied digital work into direct conversation with ecological crisis and collective care. She co-creates and leads Livable Futures, a public-practice and podcast initiative, and has developed transmedia performance rituals including *Climate Gathering* and *Climate Banshee*. *Upwelling* (2022), a sonic and visual poem memorializing the early pandemic, premiered at the Wexner Center for the Arts. Across all these phases, Zuniga Shaw has worked as performer, vocalist, creative director, teacher, editor, and facilitator, consistently organizing collaborations in which dancers, designers, programmers, scientists, and publics can think together through movement.