Ray Eliot Schwartz is an artist, educator, and investigator, who has worked on four continents, facilitating innovative movement-based projects with diverse populations for the concert stage, alternative venues, as well as within participatory performance platforms. He graduated high school from the North Carolina School of the Arts, received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA from University of Texas-Austin. He is the founder of Performática: Foro Internacional de Danza Contemporánea y Artes del Movimiento, serves on the board of directors of ISMETA, and is a Research Associate and Core Faculty at the Center for Mind Body Movement. He co-founded four contemporary dance projects in the southern U.S.: Sheep Army, The Zen Monkey Project, Steve’s House Dance Collective, and THEM, and has served on the faculty of the American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, MELT, the ZMP Summer Dance Intensive, the Colorado College Summer Dance Festival. and SFADI, among others. Somatic studies include certifications in Body-Mind Centering® and the Feldenkrais Method®, and he is a published scholar who writes about somatic movement education and contemporary dance practice. He was a professor in the Dance Program of the University of the Americas-Puebla in México from 2006-2022 and academic and administrative coordinator of the program from 2008 to 2018 and is currently an Instructor in the Program in Dance at Duke University, and coordinator of the M.A. in Dance Education through the University of Northern Colorado.
