Professor of Dance Sybil Huskey will receive the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) at the NDEO 18th Annual National Conference on October 9. The organization’s highest award, the Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes exemplary leadership in and innovative contributions to the field of dance education.
Huskey has worked in academic, professional and entrepreneurial arenas of dance for 46 years. She graduated from the University of Utah with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Modern Dance and began her teaching career at Cornell University in 1970. She left Cornell in 1972 to dance professionally in New York City, then returned to full-time teaching in 1979 with a position at Arizona State University, where she was interim chair of dance and assistant dean of the College of Fine Arts. A position at Winthrop University, where she served as chair of the Department of Theatre and Dance, brought her back to the east coast. In 1992 she came to UNC Charlotte.
Among past choreographic grants and commissions, Huskey has received two Fulbright Senior Scholar awards. In Finland she was guest artist/teacher in the inaugural year of the dance degree program at the Theatre Academy. In New Zealand, she co-developed choreographic teaching materials for the national arts curriculum and toured a lecture demonstration. As guest faculty at London’s Kingston University, she co-authored the institution’s first dance degree curriculum.
Since 2008 Huskey has investigated technology-enhanced choreography, video annotation software, and pedagogical applications around video collaboration. Along with her project partners, Celine Latulipe and David Wilson of the College of Computing and Informatics, she is the recipient of three National Science Foundation grants. Their first project, Dance.Draw, developed nine dances, using portable sensing technology that enabled dancers to interact in real time with aesthetic digital projections created by their movements and different software systems.
An online software platform developed for Dance.Draw to allow dancers and choreographers to collaborate outside the rehearsal space by independently viewing and commenting on dance videos led eventually to a software patent and the creation of Video Collaboratory, LLC. At the NDEO Annual National Conference, Huskey will present a paper on this research, "Using Video for Choreographic Analysis, Advancement, Assessment."