About Nancy

Nancy Stark Smith first loved moving as an athlete and gymnast, leading her to study and perform modern and postmodern dance in the early 1970s, greatly influenced by the Judson Dance Theater breakthroughs of the 1960s in NYC. Nancy danced in the first performances of contact improvisation in 1972 with Steve Paxton and others and has since been central to its development as dancer, teacher, performer, writer/publisher, and organizer. She has traveled extensively throughout the world teaching and performing contact and other improvised dance work with Paxton and many other favorite dance partners and performance makers, including musician Mike Vargas, with whom she’s been co-teaching and collaborating since 1998. She co-founded Contact Quarterly, an international dance journal, in 1975, which she continues to co-edit and publish along with other dance literature. Her work is featured in several books and films, and she has been developing the Underscore, a long-form dance improvisation structure, since 1990. Her first book, Caught Falling, with David Koteen, came out in 2008.  www.nancystarksmith.com