DANA SALISBURY

Dana Salisbury, winner of New York Dance and Performance Award (a “Bessie”), is a multi-disciplinary artist whose investigations span dance, video, language, site-specific performance/installation and visual art.  Her work, Dance Insider has reported “evidences her acute consciousness, her keen multi-disciplinary attention to detail.” The Village Voice described her work as offering “trenchant dispatches from a life of keeping eyes and mind wide open.” Her dances and videos have been seen in New York at PS 122, Judson Church, Dance Theater Workshop, Dixon Place, University Settlement and the 92nd Street Y.  She has created site-specific works for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the Old American Can Factory in Brooklyn. Her visual art has been exhibited widely in museums and galleries.

For the last several years, inspired by the sensate and imaginative life of the blind, Salisbury has been exploring non-visual perception. Her dance production, “Whole-Body-Seer” (2004) offered experiential equivalents of vision without sight. A quotation from John Hull’s, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness helped shape her thinking: “I do not think of myself so much as a blind person, which would define me with reference to sighted people and as lacking something, but simply as a whole-body-seer. A blind person is simply someone in whom the specialist function of sight is now devolved upon the whole body, and no longer specialized in a particular organ.” Dark Dining Projects celebrates "whole-body-seeing".

For more, visit www.danasalisbury.com.