Teresa L Heiland

• Professor
• Dance Education, Somatics, Laban Movement Analysis

CLMA, PhD, RSMT/D/E, Professor of Dance at University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Teresa works at the intersection of the performing arts, education, wellness, teaching-and-learning, movement education, and dance literacy. She seeks to produce pedagogical and research activities that inform disciplinary practices, provoke personal development, and deepen dancers’ understanding of their potential as artists, educators, and lifelong learners and leaders. She teaches Laban Movement Analysis, Motif notation using the Language of Dance® approach, dance pedagogy; somatics and dance wellness through Cortical Field Reeducation, Pilates, Franklin Method III, Gyrotonic, and Bartenieff Fundamentals; dance composition; and a broad array of dance analysis, research methods, and approaches to writing about dance. During summers, Dr. Heiland certifies dancers in the Language of Dance® Foundations and Master Practitioner courses through the Language of Dance® USA. Since 2006, she has serves on the Board of the Language of Dance Center promoting quality educational curriculum using Motif notation for creative praxis and community inclusivity, engagement, and dance education advocacy. She has restaged Nijinsky’s L’apres midi d’un Faune from Labanotation with a live symphony orchestra as well as Parson’s Parsons Etude and she has published articles about learning approaches within dance education, forms of dance literacy, teaching and learning, Laban Movement Analysis, Motif notation, imagery’s effects on dance technique, and body image in Journal of Dance Education, Research in Dance Education; Journal of Imagery Research in Sport and Physical Activity; Dance: Current Selected Research 7 & 9; and Geographies of Dance: Body, Movement, and Corporeal Negotiations. She is the founding and lead Editor of the international, peer-reviewed, academic Journal of Movement Arts Literacy (http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/jmal/), which serves to promote the scholarly study of movement arts literacy. Her forthcoming book titled, Leaping into Dance Literacy with Language of Dance is under contract with Intellect Publishing in the United Kingdom. While her formative training was in Wigman/Holm, Limon, Hawkins, improvisation, ballet, jazz, musical theatre, ballroom and Lindy, she also studied Javanese dance intensively for two years with Valerie Vetter and one year at Institute Seni Indonesia and at nDalem Pujokusuman in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. Her performing career was with Christine Vilardo’s company, Moving Target, the New York New Music and Dance Ensemble, and Sai, a multidisciplinary pickup company in NYC. She completed her PhD in Dance in Higher Education and Administration and MA in Dance Education at New York University and holds a BFA in Studio Art. She taught in the dance department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for fifteen years before joining the faculty at UNCG.