Library

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chapter / 2026

Belly Dancing: Somatic Modes of Improvising Happiness

This chapter refines Sellers-Young's idea of belly dancing as a somatic mode of improvising happiness. Happiness here is not simple cheerfulness or entertainment. It is a relational state produced through music, rhythm, responsive movement, audience interaction, and the temporary reorganization of self with others. Belly dance becomes a practice for improvising joy within social constraint. The chapter draws together decades...

Middle Eastern Dance: Histories, Theories, Performances

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seminar talk / 2026

Lived Body in Motion

This seminar presentation distills the concerns of Sellers-Young's Lived Body in Motion project for an audience setting. It presents embodied memory as an archive shaped by dance training, fieldwork, childhood landscape, spirituality, teaching, and technological mediation. The seminar format foregrounds dialogue: the work is not only a completed text but an invitation to think with the moving body as method. Its significance...

Design Informatics Seminar Series, University of Edinburgh, March

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chapter / 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 discipline, and national cultural pride rather than through Western harem fantasy. Yet she also shows that Reda's project was hybrid, modern, classed, and gender-regulating...

Palgrave Handbook of Folk Dance and Nationalism

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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 patterns, provoke revision, and support a living archive, but it cannot breathe, feel weight, carry kinesthetic memory, or bear bodily consequence. The book matte...

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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 place who reveal environmental fragility, cultural memory, Indigenous presence, community identity, and the tensions of development and preservation. The lecture is...

Brain Food Presentation, University of California, Davis, January

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symposium paper / 2024

Yasmina Ramzy: Dance and the City

This symposium paper examines Yasmina Ramzy and Arabesque in Toronto as a local-global-local formation of Middle Eastern dance. Sellers-Young analyzes how Ramzy's work addresses a multicultural urban public while remaining grounded in Egyptian music, tarab, ensemble choreography, spiritual interpretation, and diaspora community formation. The city is not a backdrop; it is the condition in which the dance's meanings are negoti...

Symposium of North African, Middle Eastern and Caucasian Dance, Pomona College, October

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peer-reviewed article / 2023

Autoethnography and Somatic Modes of Attention

This article develops Sellers-Young's somatic autoethnography as a method. She examines how attention is formed through body structure, sensory capacities, childhood place, trauma, religious inheritance, and movement training. Autoethnography here is not self-display; it is a disciplined inquiry into how the researcher's body becomes the medium through which cultures are perceived. The work gathers several strands of her care...

Public

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A

single-author monograph / 2022

Artists Activating Sustainability: The Oregon Story

This book expands Sellers-Young's embodied philosophy into sustainability and place-based arts. Oregon is presented not as untouched Eden, but as a complex landscape shaped by Indigenous presence, settlement, extraction, land-use conflict, wildfire, drought, tourism, and local memory. Artists matter because they can make these layered relations perceptible, affective, and publicly discussable. The book's examples show sustain...

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peer-reviewed article / 2020

Oregon’s Sanctuary Stage: Giving Voice to the Voiceless

This article analyzes Sanctuary Stage in Oregon as a community performance process that creates public space for marginalized voices. Sellers-Young emphasizes story circles, trust-building, collaborative script development, performance, and dialogue. Sanctuary is not only a theme; it is a method for moving private memory into public recognition. The work extends her theory of performance as social redress into civic life. Rat...

The International Journal of Social, Political, and Community Agendas in the Arts

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edited volume / 2020

Spiritual Herstories: Call of the Soul in Dance Research

This is a collection of works by internationally recognized women leading the field of dance research and spirituality across the globe. Building on current soulful research scholarship in the discipline, these authors offer extensive and detailed research into spirituality, dance, gender, religion, and somatics. Written by women dance scholars in higher education, this evocative and illuminating work highlights a growing dis...

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