Born in St.Louis and raised in Virginia, Sarah Skaggs began her dance training at the age of four in ballet. She first studied modern dance with her teacher and mentor Eija Celli at Sweet Briar College where she earned a B.A. with Honors in Theatre Arts. During her twenty years in New York, she has studied the traditional techniques of Jose Limon and Erick Hawkins as well as several somatic techniques. She has received six National Endowment for the Arts Choreography fellowships and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships as well as the numerous grants from the Rockefeller, Culpeper, Jerome, Harkness, Greenwall, Dreyfus and Bulova Foundations. She has the honor of having a two page entry devoted to her in the International Dictionary of Modern Dance.

In addition to her extensive travel and teaching in Hong Kong, Prague, Taipei and Bali her work has been produced by The Joyce Theatre's "Altogether Different" series, Lincoln Center Festival, The Andy Warhol Museum, Dance Theatre Workshop, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, PS 122, Jacob's Pillow, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Dublin Arts Festival and most recently at the Society of Dance History Scholars conference at Stanford University. She has served on the Board of Directors of The Danspace Project at St.Mark's Church in New York since 1992. She holds an MFA in Dance Studies from Hollins University/American Dance Festival and is the director of the dance program at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania

Her choreographic research over many years has focused on the intersection between social and concert dance. From these investigations, she has created many site-specific works that have been performed in gymnasiums, parking lots, parks and dance clubs—where the communal and kinetic collide to create dynamic social spaces for audiences new to modern dance to interact. Currently, she is expanding her post 9/11 work Dances for Airports into a large scale public art project orr "roving memorial" that will be performed in three locations, NYC, PA, and DC for the ten year anniversary of September 11th.

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Sarah Skaggs Dance is launching a three-location public art project drawing on her solo piece, Dances for Airports, choreographed right after the 9/11 attacks. The project, “9/11 Dance: A Roving Memorial,” takes the solo work and transforms it into a large-scale, public art project.

"9/11 Dance: A Roving Memorial" is an 11-minute dance-installation that is embedded in parks and other public spaces. The times/places follow:

NEW YORK CITY (dancers)

12:00  Union Square Park (north end - Farmer's market area)

1:00  Washington Square Park (north end - near the arch)

3:00 Battery Park  (north end - near the Sphere sculpture)

WASHINGTON, DC (dancers)

1:00   Arts on Foot, near Chinatown Metro stop

2:00  National Museum of Women in the Arts

2:30   The Old Post Office Pavilion.


SHANKSVILLE, PA (dancers)

1:20  Opening Gate - Flight 93 National Memorial Park