Sara Shelton Mann has created a substantial body of work over a 55-year career as a dancer and choreographer. From 1979 to 1996, She directed the San Francisco-based company Contraband in a series of unique, immersive performances that came to represent a Bay Area performance aesthetic.

As a process choreographer, her work is deeply collaborative and interdisciplinary with a focus on weaving stories, experiences, and provocations into improvisational movement scores with a deep commitment to experimenting with new methods and mediums for presenting dance. Like many artists who have spent a lifetime in the heart of their craft, Mann has come to believe that the exploration of dance forms a vital collective heritage that transcends the artifact of performance. Through this colorful heritage of training and dance, Mann seeks to facilitate the emergence of the next generation of Bay Area dance voices. 

My art is of a piece with my healing work and political engagement: it is meant to reveal and transmit the story of our collective humanity—our potential for excellence, our danger—in a time of global change, chaos, and paradigm shift. It is an antidote to fear, doubt, and greed as the face of who we are.