KENT DE SPAIN is recognized for his work as both a dance/multimedia artist and a researcher. He received his B.A. in Dance (1980) and M.A. in Choreography (1986) from U.C.L.A., and his Ed.D. in Dance Studies from Temple University (1997). He has taught and toured throughout the United States and beyond, including performances at Jacob's Pillow and Judson Church, and has performed for a number of choreographers, including being a guest artist with the Brazilian modern dance company Grupo Tran Chan, Kei Takei and Moving Earth, Lower Left, and the dance/theater troupe Ausdruckstanz. He has been the recipient of several major awards, including the Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Choreography and an Established Choreographers Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He also received a Performance Fellowship from the Philadelphia Repertory Development Initiative, which commissioned choreographer Ralph Lemon to create an original work, So this is the hero, for he and his partner Leslie Dworkin. Presently an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, De Spain has taught master classes and workshops in the United States, Europe, and Asia, has been a Visiting Artist/Professor in Dance at Columbia College, University of Georgia, Oberlin College, U.C.L.A., and the University of North Carolina - Greensboro, and has been on the dance faculty at Temple University and Bryn Mawr College.
De Spain is widely known as an authority on improvisational process in movement. He has published a series of articles in the journal Contact Quarterly examining the relationship between movement improvisation and recent scientific thought (Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory, Neuropsychology). He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Improvisation at Ohio State University, his dissertation is still the most comprehensive academic study of improvisational process yet undertaken, and his essay, The Cutting Edge of Awareness: Reports From the Inside of Improvisation, appears in the book "Taken by Surprise." He has presented his broad-ranging dance research at numerous international conferences and symposia, including the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD), the "Uncommon Senses" Conference at Concordia University in Montreal, the "body/machine" congress in Toronto, and the Multimedia Technologies and Applications (MTAC) conference in Irvine, California. De Spain has also written extensively on the interface between dance and technology, and his articles, Dance and Technology: A Pas de Deux for Posthumans and Notes from the Dance/Tech Front Lines, plus his presentations at Dancing with the Mouse and other conferences have established him as an important voice in the discourse surrounding the critical and theoretical implications of the interface between the moving human body and technology.
