Scott Delahunta

Scott deLahunta is a dance researcher, writer, organizer and educator whose work has fundamentally changed how choreographic knowledge is documented, shared and studied across disciplines. Rather than treating the finished performance as the sole source of understanding, deLahunta has spent three decades building frameworks that make creative process itself researchable and discussable—connecting choreographers with scientists, technologists and other artists without reducing dance to steps alone.

From 1994 to 2006, deLahunta taught at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, where he helped develop the Amsterdam Master of Choreography. This position immersed him in practice-led research, a methodology where artists articulate their decision-making throughout creation. During an associate research fellowship at Dartington College of Arts from 2000 to 2009, he began sustained collaborative inquiry into creative process with choreographer Wayne McGregor. That partnership deepened when deLahunta directed R-Research, the interdisciplinary research department of Wayne McGregor | Random Dance, from 2008 to 2013, connecting choreographic thinking to cognitive science while anchoring the work in studio practice.

Between 2006 and 2010, deLahunta worked as a research fellow at the Amsterdam School of the Arts in close collaboration with Emio Greco | PC. This period produced the Inside Movement Knowledge project (2008–10), which investigated how an artist's movement practice could be documented, transmitted and discussed across different media and research contexts. The project demonstrated that choreographic knowledge need not be flattened to be shared.

From 2010 to 2014, deLahunta directed the first phase of Motion Bank, a project of The Forsythe Company. Motion Bank worked with guest choreographers including Deborah Hay, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, Thomas Hauert, and Bebe Miller to create digital scores and online resources. Rather than developing a single proprietary notation system, the first phase released multiple synchronized representations—video, annotation, score and commentary—designed to expose complexity rather than erase it. DeLahunta later co-directed Motion Bank with Florian Jenett and served as senior research fellow at Deakin Motion.Lab from 2014 to 2019. He is currently listed as Professor Emeritus at Coventry University's Centre for Dance Research, where his sustained focus remains on how dance becomes data, annotation, archive and shared inquiry while preserving the contingencies of bodies and creative process.