Accepting the outcome of a dare, dancer and choreographer Alice Sheppard resigned her tenured professorship to train with Kitty Lunn and Infinity Dance Theater. After an apprenticeship, Sheppard joined AXIS Dance Company where she became a core company member, toured nationally, and taught in the company’s education and outreach programs. In between AXIS and Kinetic Light, Sheppard danced in projects with Ballet Cymru/GDance, and Marc Brew Company in the United Kingdom. In the United States, she performed with Full Radius Dance, Marjani Forté, MBDance, Infinity Dance Theater, and Steve Paxton.
A USA Artist, Creative Capital grantee and Bessie Award winner, Sheppard is the founder and artistic lead for Kinetic Light, a disability arts organization, working at the intersections of disability, dance, design, identity, and technology to create transformative art and advance the intersectional disability arts movement. Through nuanced investment in the histories, cultures, and artistic work of disabled people and (disabled) people of color, Kinetic Light promotes intersectional disability aesthetics as a creative force and access as an aesthetic critical to the creative process.
At MacDowell, Sheppard worked on an aerial dance solo, And Dawn Rises Slowly. Dawn will premiere at the 2024 Aerial Arts Festival in San Francisco. Some of the earlier movement for the piece was included in Record Twenty Twenty 2020, the San Francisco Aerial Arts Festival.
Portrait image description: Alice Sheppard, a multiracial Black woman with red, gold, peach, and copper dyed curly hair, sits in a traditional English garden. A lush green landscape of plants and flowers grow behind her. A birdhouse dangles from a tree. Draped over a lime green chair, Alice sits, wrapped in a heath grey sweater and light blue scarf. One arm curls up and supports her head, a broad smile opens her face.
