Karen Bradley is Associate Professor of Dance and Director of Graduate Studies in Dance at theUniversity of Maryland. She is a Certified Movement Analyst in Laban Movement Analysis and is on the Board of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City. As a movement analyst, she has worked in dance therapy, with learning disabled children, in arts education research and policy, and observes and coaches politicians and business leaders.
She authored the book Rudolf Laban as a part of Routledge’s series on 20th Century performance practitioner. In addition, she has published book chapters, articles, and presentations on arts education, specifically learning theory and styles as observed and accessed through dance and movement. She has also choreographed, written and directed for theatre in the Baltimore and Washington, DC communities and is currently writing an online book: Ultimate Moves: Fluency in Your Other Native Language.
Bradley comments regularly in the media on political figures and their body movement, most recently in The New Yorker magazine, for the Washington Post, and has appeared on Hardball, with Chris Matthews and Inside Politics on CNN.
She recently received an ADVANCE grant from the University of Maryland for a pilot study entitled “Your Brain on Dance”, in which she will work with Dr. Jose Contreras-Vidal’s team at the University of Houston to determine brain-wave patterns for particular expressive movement qualities. She is also a part of the leadership team on a grant from the Canadian government entitled “Moving Stories: Digital Tools for Movement, Meaning, and Interaction.” The project is a partnership among the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in NY, Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in Vancouver, BC, and the University of Illinois’ eDream Center.
Bradley has been writing core standards for dance in the US, developing a book chapter on dance and arts integration, and overseeing a grant for the National Dance Education Organization from the National Endowment for the Arts entitled EVIDENCe: Evidence in the Value of Dance Education for Our Nation’s Children, in which current statistics, databases, research, and project reports are being mined for evidence of the power of dance to learning in children.
