Shawn McConneloug has been creating art since 1990. Her performance works have been seen in the Twin Cities at Walker Art Center, the Southern Theatre as well as dozens of other "alternative venues", in New York at Dance Theatre Workshop, and on tour both nationally and internationally. She has received many awards and fellowships including a National Endowment for the Arts Choreographer’s Fellowship, a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship and several McKnight Choreographic and Interdisciplinary Fellowships. She held the Cowles Chair at the University of Minnesota Dance Department in 2003. SHE Captains, her most recent work with her company, Shawn McConneloug and her Orchestra,* received a 2006 Sage Award for Design.

In addition to her live performance work, McConneloug has collaborated with filmmaker Greg Cummins creating short films that have been presented at over fifteen festivals across the US and Europe, including the Sundance Festival in Utah, Dance Screen in Vienna and La Nuit du Court Métrage Américain à Monaco Festival. Articles about her work have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Village Voice, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, and The Miami Herald. Deborah Jowitt, in The New York Times, called her “rambunctious…original and beguiling.” Mike Steele, writing for the StarTribune, has called her work “witty, brainy, totally disarming...”

*orchestra (or’kistre)(<L<Gk orchestra dancing space<orcheesthai to dance)