Faculty and Staff
Julianne O’Brien Pedersen, Dance
Department of Music & Dance
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
julianne.pedersen@emich.edu
Julianne O'Brien Pedersen is an Associate Professor of Dance at Eastern Michigan, a certified Movement Analyst, a choreographer whose work has been presented nationally and internationally, and a founding member of the Peter Sparling Dance Company. As a featured member of the company, she has had the opportunity to work with Pulitzer prize winning scientists and composers, internationally renowned opera stars, and perform the leading role as "The Woman in White" in Martha Graham's 1942 masterpiece "Diversion of Angels". She "excels at embodying and transcending Sparling's choreography" (The Dance Insider) and has been reviewed as a "marvelously driven" (Chicago Tribune), "radiant" (Ann Arbor News) dancer with "grace and forceful presence" (La Prensa Grafica, El Salvador). Accolades include reviews in Dance Magazine, as well as the 1998 Washtenaw County Annie Award for Performing Arts Individual.
O'Brien Pedersen's choreography reflects an interest in social and historical conditions and often explores tensions between states of being. Her work has examined the struggle between constraint and freedom, progress and destruction, and theories of dance as well as birth-order. She has collaborated with composers, video-artists, sculptors, and choreographers. She has been commissioned by The Moore and Moore Dance Company of Michigan and twice by The Peter Sparling Dance Company to create new modern pieces for their repertory. In 1999 O'Brien Pedersen received the Eastern Michigan University Provost's New Faculty Research Award for her creative work. She received a performance and choreography grant from the United States Embassy of El Salvador, as well as three choreography awards from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and three grants from the Michigan Association for the Education of Young Children to develop dance education curriculum. Her choreography "exults in the luxury of movement" (Ann Arbor News) and is noted as "keen and comical" (Lakeville Journal, CT), "distinctive" (Berkshire Eagle, MA) and "right in a contrary way" (The Washington Post ).
She received her MFA from Ohio State University, where she developed a new degree option for graduate students to write a historical thesis along with their performance and choreography. Her thesis, "A spatial history of the dance" explored spatial changes on the stage and related them to the restructuring of social space associated with postmodernity.
O'Brien Pedersen teaches choreography, dance history, Bartenieff Fundamentals, Laban Movement Analysis, introduction to the performing arts, teaching methods, creative movement, movement for actors, and ballet, jazz, and modern techniques. Her modern classes are informed by Bartenieff Fundamentals, yoga, and the traditions of Graham and Limon. She has taught dance to all ages from nursery schools, studios, colleges and nursing homes. She has served as the Manager for the Dance Gallery Studio of Ann Arbor, as well as the Eastern Michigan University Dance Program Coordinator. She remains an active student of multiple forms of yoga and dance technique, gardening, and how-to-books on raising toddlers.
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