Associate Professor of Theater Arts
University of California, Santa Cruz
tedw [at] ucsc [dot] edu

Ted Warburton works at the intersection of the performing arts, education, and digital technologies. He finds the great successes of these areas are not merely technical – not found isolated in the perfectly articulated word, dance leap, or line of computer code – but are in the measure of human impact. For this reason, he seeks to produce creative and research activities that inform disciplinary practices, provoke personal development, and connect communities within and beyond UC Santa Cruz. Like many contemporary artists, Warburton employs interactive digital media and telecommunication technologies to create the visual, aural and connective materials for his works. He goes a step further by making digital technologies and remote collaborations essential components in live performances that fuse dance, theater, media, and network designs. A recent dance theater experiment, “Lubricious Transfer” used digital media and Internet2 to produce collaborative, interactive, and simultaneous performances broadcast live to local and remote audiences in Santa Cruz and New York City.

In his scholarly work, Ted investigates thinking through dance, examining the nature of dance cognition and creativity, teaching and learning. His participation in an interdisciplinary working group on motion capture unites these artistic and research concerns in the development of software tools for use in movement skill assessment, distance dance education, and interactive theatrical performance.

Ted serves as a dance faculty member in Theater Arts and as a Project Group leader in the Digital Arts and New Media graduate (MFA) program. He is Director of Research for the National Dance Education Organization and Associate Editor of the Research in Dance Education journal (Routledge).