Does the NEA Need Saving?
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2017-11-01
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What are the stakes in saving the NEA, today? Departing from the recent legislative back-and-forth between President Donald Trump and Congress over the budgetary future of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), this performance analysis of the NEA’s 31 March 2017 meeting of the National Council on the Arts reveals the complex political posturing that undergirds federal support for the arts in US culture.
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Wilbur, Sarah (2017). Does the NEA Need Saving?. TDR/The Drama Review, 61(4). pp. 96–106. 10.1162/DRAM_a_00694 Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/17245.
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Scholars@Duke
Sarah Wilbur
Sarah Wilbur is an Associate Professor of the Practice, jointly appointed in Dance and Theater Studies. She is also serving the second of a two-term appointment as the Director of Graduate Studies in Dance.
As an artist and humanist who studies arts labor through the lens of performance, Sarah's research is shaped by her longstanding work as a cross-sector choreographer and collaborator working in concert dance, theatre, musical theater, opera, K-12 education, social services, clinical, community, congregate and veteran health care contexts. Her scholarly contributions highlight the relationship between economic incentives and artists' embodied choice making or "how money motivates movement" in the arts. Sarah's research, teaching and creative work center on infrastructural enactments--the hidden, or taken-for-granted resources, relations, and practices that sustain enabling environments for the arts. It is her primary goal to champion arts labor and laborers in all aspects of her professional work.
Sarah's first book, Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts historicizes the relationship between US federal dance funding policies and norms of dance aesthetic and organizational practice from the NEA's inauguration (1965) to its fiftieth anniversary year (2016). Published in 2021, Funding Bodies was a finalist for three book prizes from the Dance Studies Association (the de la Torre Bueno Award, de la Torre Bueno First Book Award and Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize) and was also a finalist for the Freedly Award from the Theatre Library Association. Having recently been awarded EXPLORE! seed funding from Duke's Office of Research and Innovation, Sarah is currently conducting ethnographic and economic research for her second monograph, tentatively entitled: Prescribing Dance: Sweating the Shaping Influence of the US Healthcare Industry on Artists' Work and Wellbeing.
Sarah's humanistic accounts of economic and infrastructural practices in dance and the performing arts appear in peer reviewed journals in theater, dance, and performance studies, including theJournal of Emerging Dance Scholarship, Performance Research, and TDR/The Drama Review. She has featured essays in the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, the Futures of Dance Studies edited collection. Essays on pandemic-era patterns of institutional recruitment and reward in the arts are forthcoming in dance, theater, and arts administration scholarly publications. Sarah also contributes public-facing commentary on the state of the US arts ecology, including a recent piece on the infrastructural stakes of economic divestment in the NEA under the second Trump administration for the open access field journal HowlRound Theater Commons (May 2025).
in service to the field of critical dance studies, Sarah recently completed a two-term appointment as a Director on the Board of the Dance Studies Association (DSA), where she worked on the Finance and Development committee to implement more equitable support systems for the largely-contingent DSA membership. In fall of 2022, Sarah founded an inter-campus, multi-disciplinary working group of arts labor researchers with support from the Franklin Humanities Institute. The "Equitable Arts Infrastructures Research Group" group includes scholars in dance, theater, performance and music from nine campuses and was awarded a collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2023-2025) to widen the conversation about the challenges of manifesting infrastructural equity in the performing arts. As an outgrowth of this collegial organizing, Sarah is one of four co-editors for a new scholarly book series entitled, Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures, which invites historical and interpretive accounts of local arts ecologies, published through the University of Texas Press. In fall of 2025, she will serve as a thought leader and invited participant in the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale Public-Facing Scholarship Think Tank, working with leaders across academia, law, finance, philanthropy, media, and cultural institutions to interrogate how value is defined and distributed in the cultural sector and how infrastructural practices in the arts align with mutualism, agency and the public good.
Sarah's pedagogical approach invites students to pay attention to the tensions between textual and embodied knowledge production. Student research takes written and enacted forms in every course that she offers. Students "succeed" when they depart course work with a honed ability to recognize and reflect on the power of embodied action and interaction within and beyond their own daily choice making. Her graduate (G) and undergraduate (UG) teaching in Dance and Theater Studies includes studio, lecture/seminar, hybrid, and service learning contexts. Course offerings at Duke include: Theories of Corporeality (G), Movement in Question: Introduction to Dance Studies (UG/G), Art as Work: Valuing Labor in the Arts (UG/G), Artists in Healthcare: Collaborations and Complexities (UG-Service Learning), Research Methods in Dance (G), Capstone Seminar: Research Methods in Dance Studies and Choreographic Performance (UG), MFA Proseminar: Professional Practices (G); Choreographic Praxis (G), Critique (G), Interdisciplinary Performance (UG/G), Improvisation (UG), and Modern Dance (UG). From 2022-2024, Sarah served as the lone arts representative on the Trinity Curriculum Development Committee, one of twenty faculty appointees tasked with undertaking research and design of a brand new undergraduate curriculum. This service resulted in the proposal of a new framework for student learning including an enhanced commitment to the arts and humanities. The proposal was accepted by Trinity Arts & Sciences Council in 2024 and launches in Fall 2025.
Sarah's creative work as a choreographer and dance/movement facilitator in Durham and the triangle area spans community, clinical, and conventional performing arts contexts. Building on 25+years of work as an artist-collaborator alongside health care professionals, she currently facilitates a weekly adaptive and participatory dance program in the Adult Day Health Program at the Durham Center for Senior Life (DCSL). Sarah also serves on the Board of Directors for Dementia Inclusive, Inc., where she collaborates with elder abuse advocates, medical and social service professionals and community members as the lead for the Arts Sector, working to expand equitable opportunities for cultural expression for adults living with cognitive decline in Durham County. The Arts Sector currently enjoys partnerships with DCSL, the Nasher Museum Reflections Program, el Centro Hispano, Community Family Life & Recreation Center at Lyon Park, and Duke Dementia Family support. This community-rooted collaboration aspires to work long term on arts and health workforce development by developing an historically grounded and culturally responsive creative care curriculum for arts and care workers serving persons living with cognitive challenges.
Sarah's longstanding work as a dance artist in health care contexts (1999-present) informs her facilitation of arts and health collaborations on and beyond the Duke campus. At Duke, Sarah holds a faculty affiliation with Duke's Reimagining Medicine (ReMed) program housed at the Kenan Institute of Ethics. She is a frequent guest lecturer for the Duke School of Medicine's "Medicine, Humanities, Arts" spring seminar. Globally, Sarah works alongside Duke School of Medicine faculty on a transnational educational collaboration entitled: Global Classroom for Health Humanities & Geographies, hosted by the University of Exeter (UK). This multi-campus and multidisciplinary learning community comprised of faculty from the arts, humanities and health sciences seek to redesign a virtual graduate curricula to examine and credit how the meanings of health, illness, and care emerge through embodied experience, which is fundamentally shaped by systems of power, cultural values and the environment. Sarah's contributions to this project center on questions of practice: the dynamics of creative care as a choreographic practice rooted in intentional, embodied choice-making within and outside of institutionalized health settings.
Research Interests:
1. Dance, theater, performance, and cultural studies
2. Histories of US arts policy, funding, and philanthropy
3. Cultural labor studies, workplace ethnography in the arts, economic humanities
4. Theories of institutionality and corporeality
5. Arts and health, health humanities, critical medical humanities, disability arts
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