Rebecca Pappas uses modern and postmodern dance as tools to understand the corporeal impact of history. She makes projects that excavate the body as an archive for personal and social memory. Her choreographic projects are interdisciplinary and often created in collaboration with filmmakers, visual artists, poets, and scientists.

Her dances have toured nationally and internationally, and she has received residencies from Hambidge, Yaddo, and Djerassi, and funding from entities including The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2021 she was a CT Office of the Arts Fellow. Between 2001-2014 she was based in California where her work has been presented at ODC, REDCAT, UCLA, and Highways Performance Space. From 2014-18 she served as an Assistant Professor of Dance at Ball State University and a Guest Artist in the Masters program in Social Practice Art at University of Indianapolis . In Indiana she created community-based dance and social practice projects focusing on public parks and monuments.

In 2018 she returned home to Hartford, CT, to accept a position at Trinity College where she teaches classes in choreography, dance history, and performing arts and community. She is a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (2021), and the author of three book chapters. She continues to create choreographic works, social practice projects, and dance films in New England and California.

curriculum vitae