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Stefanie Batten Bland
Associate Professor, Theatre and Dance, Dean's Office, College of the Arts
- Office:
- Life Hall
- Email:
- battenblands@montclair.edu
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Assistant Professor, Theatre & Dance Department, College of Arts
Specialty: Immersive Theatre, Dance-Cinema, Dance-Theatre, Physical Theatre
Photo by JC Dhien.
Bio:
Creative Director & Choreographer Stefanie Batten Bland (SBB) is an award-winning creator of proscenium, cinematic, and immersive worlds that answer the quest for belonging.
2025 NYSCA Artist, 2023 Dance Magazine cover artist & Creative Capital Awardee, and 2022 BAM NEXT WAVE commissioned artist, SBB was raised in SoHo when it was led by artists. SBB interrogates contemporary and historical cultural symbolism – their categories of cultural identifiers and how these identities influence human relationships. Her work is at the intersection of dance-theatre, film, and immersive experience.
SBB danced for Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, Tanztheater Wüppertal Pina Bausch, Punchdrunk's Sleep No More, Luna Luna, Hungarian choreographer Pal Frenák, and creator Georges Momboye of the Côte d’Ivoire. SBB established Company SBB in France in 2008 and moved it to New York in 2012.
Known for her unique visual and movement aesthetic in the immersive field, SBB is Artistic Director of The Atelier SBB, Creative Casting & Movement Director for Life & Trust, she pioneered the methods which made her the Performance-Identity liaison for Sleep No More, and the Artistic Director of the first immersive theatre summer intensive in the USA CONCRETE, SBB is constantly pushing the boundaries of mixed reality art.
Company SBB has been presented at BAM Next Wave Festival, Lincoln Center, Bates Dance Festival, Celebrity Series (Boston), Modlin Center for the Arts (Richmond, VA), ADF, The Yard at Martha's Vineyard, Duke Performances, PEAK Performances, La MaMa Experimental Theater and internationally at the Spoleto Festival in Italy, Danse à Lille in France, and Tanztendenzen in Germany amongst others.
SBB has created for fashion and lifestyle partners Louis Vuitton, Van Cleef & Arpels, Hermès, and Guerlain. She has produced 14 dance cinema films shown in international festivals in South Africa, Buenos Aires, Greece, and Germany. Her latest dance film, Kolonial, has received fourteen US and international film awards and was nominated for three Bessie Awards. She has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Dance Magazine, Marie Claire, and Dance Europe.
SBB receives grants and awards from National Dance Project Production NDP, Creative Capital, NYSCA, Guggenheim Works In Process, Harkness Foundation, a Jerome Robbins Award, Jerome Robbins Support Grants, a Bessie Schönberg Fellowship at The Yard, and a Toulmin Creator Fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU. SBB received her MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College and is currently an Associate Professor at Montclair State University's Department of Theatre and Dance.
IG @sbb_land @sbb_roll
companysbb.org Concreteimmersive.org
Specialization
Specialization Dance-Theatre, Site-Sympathetic & Immersive Theatre teaching modalities.
Resume/CV
Links
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Research Projects
Embarqued - Stories Of Soil - World Premiere 2022
Embarqued: Stories of Our Soil
Embarqued, an installation based dance-theatre work rooted in monuments and memory.Centered by a performative shipmast that invites reflection and reveals post-colonial foundations and mythology in the United States. Interrogating existing relationships to memorials, we call up our African ancestral stories integral to making our history united, enabling us to viscerally and holistically connect our country both forwards and backwards in space and time and through soil itself.
Life & Trust - Performance
Casting and Movement Director for Life and Trust production by Emursive Productions.
Challenging casting bias and patterning within immersive European American productions. Offering alternative casting visuals and parallel stories to support diverse hiring policies. Directing and creating movement to support story narration.
#WelcomeToBirdland - Guidebook in Dance Theatre and Space Making Modalities
#WelcomeToBirdland, is a manuscript which will inform makers of all types. My intention is for this book to foster collaboration with creators in theatre, dance performance and visual artists who have a performative installation practice as well as artist-educators and students.
At the book's core, is emphasis in articulation, presence, and dynamic decision making. By offering integrated examples of dance, theatre training and theory to students the book offers a current preparation that is tailored for the dance or physical-theatre trends that my students will be encountering in the majority of today’s immersive and installation performing art productions.