About Rachel Rugh

(Rugh sounds like kangaROO!)

Rachel is a dancer, teacher, mover and shaker currently based in Blacksburg, VA.  As a performer, she has collaborated with the DC-based Dance Exchange, as well as Seattle choreographers Pat Graney, Amy O’Neil, and Jurg Koch.  Her choreographic work has been featured at the Seattle International Dance Festival, Movement Research (NYC), and the Washington, D.C. Capital Fringe Festival.  Her graduate choreography was chosen to represent the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the gala performance of the American College Dance Association's North-Central Conference.  Rachel is also a founding member of Mountain Empire Performance Collective, a long-distance dance collective dedicated to alternative processes of making work while separated by both time and space. With Mountain Empire, she has performed on the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage.

A joyful and enthusiastic movement educator, Rachel has over ten years of experience teaching creative dance to all ages and stages of movers, and currently teaches at Radford University and Virginia Tech.  She has presented her work at a variety of national performing arts conferences including the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO), the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in America (SEAMUS), the Virginia Tech Gender, Bodies and Technology Conference (GBT), and the American College Dance Association (ACDA).

Rachel is the director of the dance program at the Virginia Governor's School for Humanities and Visual and Performing Arts. She is an adjunct faculty member at Radford University and Virginia Tech, as well as a faculty fellow at the VT Center for Communicating Science. In 2017/18, she was recipient of the 2017/2018 Dr. Robert L.A. Keeley Healing Arts Residency at the Carilion NRV Hospital, where she provided therapeutic movement experiences for patients, staff and visitors. She has recently contributed to research on connections between the brain and body through her work as a Teaching and Research Artist at the Virginia Tech Embodied Brain Laboratory. In her *spare* time, she is the director of Blacksburg Dance Theater, a dance studio in Blacksburg that offers affordable, accessible creative dance training for all ages. She holds a BA in dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and an MFA in Dance from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.