Library

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peer-reviewed article / 2011

Arts, Artistic Process and the Community

This article argues that artistic process can create community by organizing shared perception, story, and action. Sellers-Young treats art not as a finished object delivered to passive audiences, but as a collaborative practice through which people investigate experience and make social meaning. The emphasis falls on process: listening, making, rehearsing, revising, and publicly reflecting. The piece extends her performance...

The International Journal of the Arts in Society

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award article / 2011

Dixie Durr Award for Outstanding Service to Dance Research

Faculty of Fine Arts Dean Barbara Sellers-Young receives international award Posted on 28 November 2011 There are many awards for personal achievement, ranging from the most valuable player in an amateur sports team to the Nobel Prize. Such achievements, big or small, rarely happen without the encouragement and assistance of a myriad of people behind the scenes. Researcher, author, educator and academic administrator Barbara...

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conference paper / 2010

Generational Divides: The Iemoto System in America

This paper examines the iemoto system of Japanese dance transmission as it functions in American contexts. Sellers-Young is concerned with generational divides: how lineage, obedience, repetition, and teacher authority are understood differently by immigrant, Japanese American, and non-Japanese students. The system carries continuity, but its meaning changes when it is practiced under diasporic and multicultural conditions. T...

Association for Asian Studies, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, March

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article series / 2010

Serena Wilson (1933–2007): A Student of Ruth St. Denis

This article series on Serena Wilson places a significant belly dance teacher within a lineage connected to Ruth St. Denis and American modern dance Orientalism. Sellers-Young uses Wilson's career to illuminate how Middle Eastern dance in the United States developed through a complex mixture of theatrical exoticism, modern dance inheritance, personal charisma, pedagogy, and changing ideas about feminine expression. The work i...

Gilded Serpent

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conference paper / 2009

Contemplation, Consciousness and Pedagogy

This paper develops Sellers-Young's argument that contemplative practice can transform pedagogy by changing the quality of attention students bring to learning. She frames contemplation as a disciplined mode of awareness that works alongside analytic and sensory knowing. Breath, stillness, movement, and reflective practice become tools for cultivating presence, concentration, and responsiveness. The essay is part of her broad...

Across the Threshold Conference, Duke University, March

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chapter / 2009

Ibrahim Farrah: Dancer, Teacher, Choreographer, Publisher

This chapter on Ibrahim Farrah situates him as dancer, teacher, choreographer, publisher, and central figure in American belly dance history. Sellers-Young treats Farrah not only as a performer but as a cultural mediator whose Lebanese family memory, professional training, and publishing work shaped how Middle Eastern dance was taught and understood in the United States. The chapter contributes to her larger project of compli...

When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders

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conference paper / 2009

Neuroplasticity and Performance

This paper brings neuroscience into Sellers-Young's long-standing concern with training, habit, and transformation. Neuroplasticity provides a scientific vocabulary for something performance teachers know practically: repeated attention and embodied practice can reorganize perception, movement, and response. The performer is not fixed; the body-mind can be retrained through disciplined experience. The work is significant beca...

International Federation for Theatre Research, Lisbon, Portugal, July

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peer-reviewed article / 2009

The Value of Arts in Higher Education

This article argues for the arts as a form of knowledge central to higher education. Sellers-Young resists justifying the arts only through entertainment, enrichment, therapy, or economic value. Drawing on experiential and embodied models of learning, she presents artistic practice as a way of investigating perception, ambiguity, relation, identity, and social meaning. The work broadens her philosophy beyond dance and theatre...

The International Journal of the Arts in Society

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T

conference paper / 2009

The Value of Arts in Higher Education

This presentation version of Sellers-Young's argument for the arts in higher education emphasizes the public and pedagogical stakes of artistic practice. The arts are framed as modes of inquiry that engage body, imagination, intellect, and community. Their value lies not in ornamenting the university but in expanding how knowledge is produced and shared. The piece connects her administrative leadership with her scholarship. S...

International Conference on Arts and Society, Venice, Italy, July

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workshop paper or notes / 2008

Delilah Hawaii Workshop

These workshop materials document Sellers-Young's engagement with Delilah's ecofeminist and ritualized belly dance practice in Hawai'i. The work centers on dance as an embodied relation with nature, not a performance placed in front of nature as scenery. Delilah's practice draws together belly dance, feminist spirituality, myth, healing, Delsartean expression, and ecological awareness. For the archive, the materials matter be...

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