Dr Sarah Hopfinger (She/her) is a queer-disabled lecturer, practitioner and researcher, working at the intersections between live art, dance, performance, ecology, autobiography, queerness, chronic pain and crip practices, disability studies, intergenerational collaboration, and interdisciplinary practices.
Sarah has an artist- and research-led teaching approach. She works across the Contemporary Performance Practice (CPP) programme, mainly teaching and mentoring level 3 and 4 students. Modules include Performance Research, Into The New and Critical and Contextual Understanding.
Sarah creates new devised solo and collaborative performances. She often works with diverse collaborators including children and adults, disabled and non-disabled people, and professional and nonprofessional performers and dancers. Her current Carnegie funded practice-led research project is Ecologies of Pain has emerged from her lived experience of chronic pain: through performance and dance this project explores how living with chronic pain can contain knowledges and insights about what it means to live with, and relate to, wider ecological pain.
Sarah has presented her performance work and research nationally and internationally with diverse venues and organisations, including Made In Scotland, Take Me Somewhere, The Roundhouse, Battersea Arts Centre, South London Gallery, Platform, Summerhall (UK), ArtFart (Iceland) and Earth Matters on Stage (USA). She regularly publishes her research through traditional and alternative platforms including artist books and blogs as well as academic books and journals such as Research in Drama Education, Studies in Theatre and Performance and Performance Research. She presents her practice-led research through performance lectures at national and international conferences.
