ICE Visiting Artist: Cassie Meador

cassie_meador

ICE Visiting Artist: Cassie Meador
Monday, April 7 at 4 PM
Miller Learning Center Room 214

“I often think that I became a dancer because I grew up in a family of scientists. My parents, a neurologist and a biology professor, encouraged me to explore my surroundings. I have learned that, like the scientific process, the creative process allows us to work at the edges of what is knowable.”

Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) is pleased to host Cassie Meador, a choreographer, performer, and educator who explores environmental issues through dance and community engagement.

Cassie Meador is the Artistic Director of Dance Exchange, founded by Liz Lerman in 1976 and now regarded as one the most innovative and creatively expansive dance companies in the world. Her work is imbued with a passion for her surroundings, a belief in the human capacity for change, and a conviction that art can be a potent form of research and communication.

While at UGA, Meador will talk about future collaborations and recent work, including How To Lose a Mountain, a multi-year project that began with a 500-mile walk from Washington, DC to a site of mountaintop removal in West Virginia to trace the sources of the energy that fuel her home.

Along the way, she and Dance Exchange artists visited power plants, led movement and outdoor education workshops called Moving Field Guides, and collected stories from community members in a series called 500 Miles/500 Stories. Meador and her artistic collaborators returned to the studio to build an evening-length work that premiered in 2013 and was supported by the National Performance Network and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised Augusta, Georgia, Meador received her B.F.A. in dance from The Ohio State University. She joined the Dance Exchange in 2002 and assumed the role of Artistic Director in 2011.

For more information about Cassie Meador and Dance Exchange, please visit http://danceexchange.org.

Ideas for Creative Exploration (ICE) is an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at UGA. ICE is supported in part by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and the Graduate School.