Begin in the body
Her scholarship treats the body as memory, method, and witness.
A scholarly archive of movement and meaning
Barbara Sellers-Young
A place to enter a life of thought through dance, culture, breath, memory, and the disciplined body.
The invitation
Movement as a way of knowing
Dr. Sellers-Young's work begins from a simple, demanding insight: movement thinks. A gesture can hold memory. A dance can carry culture. A practice can change how a person perceives the world.
This archive is built for that kind of attention. It is a place to read, ask, wander, and return.
Cross cultures carefully
Dance travels through teachers, histories, institutions, and desire.
Let art change perception
Performance can make place, conflict, grief, and possibility newly visible.
Recent Works
View Librarychapter / 2026
Mahmoud Reda: Performing Egypt on the World Stage
This chapter examines Mahmoud Reda as a choreographer who helped stage Egypt for national and international audiences. Sellers-Young treats Reda's work as counter-Orientalist in important ways: it presented Egyptian dance through theatrical craft, ensemble...
single-author monograph / 2025
Lived Body in Motion: Autoethnography, Dance and AI Reflexivity
This book represents Sellers-Young's late synthesis of somatic autoethnography and AI-assisted reflection. The central question is what happens when a disembodied technological interlocutor helps organize writing about embodied memory. AI can ask questions, identify...
public lecture / 2024
Arts and Artists in the Land of Eden
This public lecture frames Oregon's arts ecology through the phrase "Land of Eden," while complicating any simple pastoral fantasy. Sellers-Young presents Oregon as beautiful, damaged, inhabited, contested, and historically layered. Artists become interpreters of...