Colleen Hooper’s choreography has been presented since 2002 and New York venues include Dance Theater Workshop's Fresh Tracks series (now New York Live Arts), Danspace Project Out of Space, Dixon Place, BRIC Studio, DanceNow/NYC Festival, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Joyce SoHo, and Dance New Amsterdam. In the Philadelphia region, her work has been featured in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Painted Bride Art Center’s Independence Foundation Gallery for the Visual Arts, and Haverford College. She received choreographic residencies from Danceworks (2013), TOPAZ ARTS (2010), Dance Theater Workshop (2007), and Dancenow/NYC SILO (2004). As a performer, Hooper has danced for Red Dive, George Russell, Katherine Kiefer Stark/The Naked Stark, Beau Hancock, and Merían Soto. She received her MFA and PhD in Dance from Temple University and she was the recipient of the 2011 Rose Vernick Award for Artistic Transformation.
Colleen Hooper researches how dance connects to economic and cultural transformations in the 20th and 21st centuries. She received a 2018 New York Public Library Short Term Fellowship to support her book project Dance from Labor to Service (1935-1982). Her writing has been published in Dance Research Journal, the International Journal of Screendance, and Dance: Current Selected Research. She serves on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Money on the Left, and she was a member of the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS) Board of Directors from 2013-2016. She earned her PhD and MFA degrees in Dance from Temple University and was a senior doctoral fellow in the Center for Humanities at Temple University (CHAT). She is an assistant professor of dance at the Conservatory for the Performing Arts at Point Park University. During her tenure, she has developed coursework examining dance history from a critical dance studies perspective, and a professional seminar that interrogates the landscape of the dance field. She has collaborated with her colleagues to organize two university-wide symposia: one addressed the arts and entrepreneurship, and the second featured Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild presenting on Black performance history and theory.
Colleen Hooper is an Assistant Professor of Dance History at Point Park University. She teaches theory and studio courses including Dance History, Somatic Introduction to Technique, Improvisation, and Professional Seminar. She also has her comprehensive Pilates certification from Drexel University and she has taught private lessons and group classes.