Organization: Thinkdance.org

Professional area/s: live performance, getting funding for performance, teaching non-academic subjects in the academy, cross-disciplinary collaboration and collaboration with academics, teaching philosophy in non-academic ways.

Jill Sigman describes herself as an interdisciplinary artist and agent of change, who choreographs with bodies and materials. She founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to think about philosophical questions and social issues through the body, and in 2016, she founded Body Politic, a program of workshops and performance laboratories to ask pressing political questions somatically.

Jill was the first Gibney Community Action Artist in Residence; has been in residence at Movement Research, Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology (Mexico), The Rauschenberg Residency, the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, and the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research at NYU; has been a Distinguished Guest Artist at the University of San Francisco Performing Arts & Social Justice program; and is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University. Her book “Ten Huts” about choreographing with waste in different parts of the world was published in 2017.

With a Certificate in Theatre and Dance from Princeton, Jill created dances and performance installations in tandem with her graduate study at Princeton. She began making art full time when she completed her Ph.D. and has always felt that she continues to do philosophy – just in more tactile and embodied ways. Her work has reached thousands of people in 13 countries.