Yacov Sharir

ISEA Bio(s) Available:

• ISEA2011

  Yacov Sharir is a chore­o­g­ra­pher, dancer, tech­nol­o­gist and in­no­va­tor. He is a Pro­fes­sor of The­atre and Dance at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas-Austin, and Artis­tic Di­rec­tor of the Austin-based Sharir Dance Com­pany. After grad­u­a­tion from the Beza­lel Acad­emy of Arts, Pro­fes­sor Sharir stud­ied at the Jerusalem Acad­emy of Music, the Bat-Sheva Dance Com­pany School, the Stuttgart Bal­let, and the Bal­let The­atre Con­tem­po­raine in Paris. He has per­formed under the di­rec­tion of Martha Gra­ham, Jerome Rob­bins, Jose Limon and Anna Sokolow, among oth­ers. A dual cit­i­zen of the U.S. and Is­rael, Sharir is the founder of both the Amer­i­can Deaf Dance Com­pany and the Sharir Dance Com­pany, a pro­fes­sional dance com­pany of the UT Col­lege of Fine Arts. As a mul­ti­ple re­cip­i­ent of the Na­tional En­dow­ment for the Arts Chore­o­graphic Fel­low­ship, he has chore­o­graphed for such com­pa­nies such as the Bat-Sheva Dance Com­pany, Hart­ford Bal­let, Dal­las Bal­let, the Kib­butz Dance Com­pany of Is­rael and the Utah Reper­tory Dance The­atre. He was a re­cip­i­ent of an “Arts And Vir­tual En­vi­ron­ments” two year fel­low­ship awarded by the Banff Cen­ter for the Arts and is en­gaged in ex­ten­sive in­ter­na­tional lec­tures and work­shops di­rectly re­lated to the is­sues of vir­tual en­vi­ron­ments, cy­ber­space and com­put­er­ized chore­og­ra­phy.  He is con­sid­ered one of the pi­o­neers in the field of dance and tech­nol­ogy, and re­cently been in­volved in nu­mer­ous re­search and cross-dis­ci­pli­nary pro­duc­tions, in­clud­ing a col­lab­o­ra­tion with in­tel­li­gent tex­tile de­signer Bar­bara Layne (Hexa­gram, Montréal). He is cur­rently com­plet­ing his PhD at the Plan­e­tar­ium (Plym­outh).