2026 State of the Art Prize, Kansas
2026 State of the Art Prize, Kansas
Shannon Stewart
Shannon Stewart
Shannon Stewart (she/they) is a choreographer, writer, and assistant professor of contemporary dance. Shannon’s work has been presented in the U.S. and Europe on stages, screens, and in galleries, most recently touring Mexico, Croatia, the Pacific Northwest and Gulf South. She teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
Dance, Performing Arts, Socially-Engaged Performance
2026
About Shannon Stewart
Lawrence, KS
Working at the intersection of dance, writing, film, and cultural organizing, Shannon Stewart creates work that shifts between punk materiality and abstraction. Their practice is body-centered, anchored in postmodern dance but traversing forms, using movement research to generate counternarratives that slip, resist, and transmute as needed. Shannon’s process is informed by a lifetime of participation in underground arts and activist communities, time spent in the wilderness and natural world, and long-form collaborations. Their work has been presented across North America and Europe, supported by residencies from the Contemporary Ats Center New Orleans, UCROSS Foundation, Art Omi, among others and has received awards for outstanding choreography and dance presentation. Through re:FRAME, a choreographic collective with Ann Glaviano, Ryuta Iwashita, jeremy de’jon guyton, and Meryl Zaytoun Murman, challenging silo-ed arts funding structures, Shannon’s work has been supported by the National Performance Network, Platforms Fund, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project (finalist). Their current project FOREST with Tahni Holt is both performance and embodied protest across three locations—mourning climate change while foregrounding interconnectedness within human and non-human worlds. Shannon has an MFA from Tulane University in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance and a BA in Community and Environmental Planning from the University of Washington. They are on faculty at the University of Kansas where they research embodied queer ecology and teach in the Department of Theatre and Dance.
Working at the intersection of dance, writing, film, and cultural organizing, Shannon Stewart creates work that shifts between punk materiality and abstraction. Their practice is body-centered, anchored in postmodern dance but traversing forms, using movement research to generate counternarratives that slip, resist, and transmute as needed. Shannon’s process is informed by a lifetime of participation in underground arts and activist communities, time spent in the wilderness and natural world, and long-form collaborations. Their work has been presented across North America and Europe, supported by residencies from the Contemporary Ats Center New Orleans, UCROSS Foundation, Art Omi, among others and has received awards for outstanding choreography and dance presentation. Through re:FRAME, a choreographic collective with Ann Glaviano, Ryuta Iwashita, jeremy de’jon guyton, and Meryl Zaytoun Murman, challenging silo-ed arts funding structures, Shannon’s work has been supported by the National Performance Network, Platforms Fund, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and New England Foundation for the Arts National Dance Project (finalist). Their current project FOREST with Tahni Holt is both performance and embodied protest across three locations—mourning climate change while foregrounding interconnectedness within human and non-human worlds. Shannon has an MFA from Tulane University in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance and a BA in Community and Environmental Planning from the University of Washington. They are on faculty at the University of Kansas where they research embodied queer ecology and teach in the Department of Theatre and Dance.