Mair Culbreth

Dr. Culbreth creates, researches, and teaches at the intersection of dance and cultural studies where corporeality is a lens for investigating socio-cultural constructions. Engaging a social kinesthetic framework, she investigates the geopolitics of movement attending to the body as a site of marginalization and embodied agency. Her doctoral research analyzed the politics, pedagogies, and performances practices of the San Francisco Bay Area utilizing LGBTQ+/Queer, disability studies, critical race, and feminist theories to articulate impact and innovation of dance makers/researchers on embodied identity.

She performed professionally in San Francisco with Kathleen Hermesdorf, Lizz Roman, Sean Dorsey, and Project Bandaloop, Culbreth also received a Bay Area Izzie Award for Performance. As a clinical researcher on an NIH-funded grant at Stanford University, she studied the impact of movement on aging and health. For her master’s research, she designed and implemented a curriculum for a San Francisco High School on embodied education.

She holds a Ph.D. in dance studies and doctoral minor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, an M.S. in kinesiology from San Francisco State University, and a B.A. in multidisciplinary studies from North Carolina State University. She is a master teacher in the Pilates Method and works with people with neurological issues such as Parkinson’s and traumatic brain injury, combining neuroscience, art, and movement repatterning to address quality of life where movement activates neuroplasticity of the brain.