Sara Hook

Biography

Sara Hook is a performer, choreographer and educator who actively promotes the synergy between the professional and academic arenas of dance.  Her diverse performing career includes touring the world with Nikolais Dance Theater, dancing for Martha Graham luminaries Pearl Lang and Jean Erdman, and being a frequent guest artist/collaborator with David Parker and the Bang Group. Her choreography has been produced in numerous New York City venues (Dance Theater Workshop-now NYLA, Danspace, Dixon Place, Symphony Space, DanceNowNYC’s Series at Joe’s Pub of the Public Theater etc.), in venues across 25 American states, and in the Netherlands, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Ecuador, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic.  Both her work and teaching focus on questions about dance history, gender expression and identity, and the role of somatic exploration in meaning-making.  Hook holds a BFA from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, an MFA from New York University, and a certification as a movement analyst from the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She has toured widely as a guest artist and been an adjudicator for numerous American College Dance Conferences. She has taught at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, Princeton University, Paul Taylor Dance Company Summer Intensives, and the Bates Dance Festival. Currently she is Professor and Head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, where she won the College of Fine and Applied Arts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2010 and the campus award for Excellence in Faculty Mentoring in 2020.  Her service to the field includes being a founding member of The Pink Ribbons Project, Dancers in Motion Against Breast Cancer.   Hook’s aim (in all her roles) is to be a good role model/citizen, helping to create opportunities for other dance artists, and to make work that both honors our artistic forebears and enlivens our experience of contemporary culture.