Susan Banyas, Writer


Susan Banyas is a dancer-writer who integrates movement, language and visual art into movement, spoken word performance, and non-fiction. Her current performance project, The Hillsboro Story is in development as a theater work and book manuscript. No Strangers Here Today, performed in collaboration with jazz composer David Ornette Cherry, features Ms. Banyas' great-great Grandmother's Civil War diary as the heartbeat of a story about the Underground Railroad. Both projects are set in southern Ohio, and dance between memory, American history, and on-going cultural detective work.

Susan Banyas

Ms. Banyas has an MA from San Francisco State University, Center for Experimental Art, with a focus on performance and documentary art. Her dynamic classes -- Everyday Dancing, Soul Stories, and Performance Lab -- have been presented in studios, universities, at conferences and through artist-in schools programs for 30 years.

She co-founded the eclectic SO&SO&SO&SO Inc. in 1976 and Dreams Well Studio (1991-2003), a low-tech experimental performance and teaching laboratory in Portland, Oregon. She is a member of the Maya Angelou Writers Guild, The International Society for the Study of Time, and has been a recent recipient of regional and national grants and fellowships.

It's Been a Busy Week is also in development -- a performance work based on the concepts from Everyday Dancing and featuring 5 dancers, a musician, and photographer.