ShaLeigh Comerford

ShaLeigh Comerford is a choreographer, director, educator, and founder of ShaLeigh Dance Works. Through immersive dance-theatre experiences, her work explores perception, shared experience, and the question of how the “I” becomes an “us.” Her projects bring together artists, audiences, and community members with diverse sensory experiences, creating spaces where people feel safe enough to see and be seen, and where stories can be experienced rather than told.

For more than two decades, Comerford has developed original works that blend movement, sound, text, visual design, and sensory experience, creating environments where audiences are invited to enter rather than simply observe. Her work investigates what becomes possible when people encounter lives, perspectives, and ways of knowing beyond their own, and how shared experience can transform the relationship between self and other. Her artistic practice has evolved through collaborative, disability-led creative processes that continue to expand conventional approaches to dance-making, audience engagement, and artistic authorship.

Comerford is the founder and Executive Artistic Director of ShaLeigh Dance Works and Artistic Director of enVISION, a disability-led artistic research and performance project developed in collaboration with blind, low-vision, Deaf, hard of hearing, DeafBlind, and disabled artists. Her work asks what becomes possible when people are invited not merely to witness another person’s experience, but to encounter it.

Her choreography and commissioned works have been presented throughout the United States and internationally, including the American Dance Festival, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, the American Dance Guild Performance Festival, Dance Theatre Workshop, Dixon Place, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Ohio University, Washington & Lee University, the University of Cambridge (England), Keio University, Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya, and the Tokyo Experimental Festival (Japan), GlogauAIR Residency & Performance Program and K77 Workshops (Germany), Even Yehuda Dance (Israel), and other presenting organizations, universities, museums, and cultural institutions. Her choreography has been featured in The New York Times, and enVISION has been highlighted in Dance Magazine. Her work has been recognized by the MAP Fund, the Jan Van Dyke Legacy Award, and the Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artist Award; honored by the City of Durham through an official mayoral proclamation recognizing her contributions to disability-led artistic practice and accessibility in the arts; and supported through residencies and creative research partnerships.

She trained at the American Dance Festival, P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, and was a member of the inaugural Gaga Teacher Training Program with Ohad Naharin and Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. She apprenticed with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and has performed with artists and companies including Keigwin + Company, Martha Clarke, Tina Croll & Company, Dendy Dance Theater, Rosie Herrera Dance Theatre, Carolina Ballet, and a restaging of Batsheva Dance Company’s Minus 16.

Comerford currently serves as Head of the Dance Program at Washington & Lee University. She has also served as Guest Faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University and continues to collaborate with the Conservatory through teaching and creative collaborations. She is the founder of ShaGa Movement and previously served on the Executive Committee of Alternate ROOTS, where she continues to contribute to the UpROOTing Ableism Workgroup.

Artist Statement

Dance is how I make sense of the world.

As someone whose Cherokee ancestry was obscured through generations of assimilation and whose experiences with neurodivergence and invisible disability shaped an early awareness of difference, translation, and belonging, I have long been drawn to stories and ways of knowing that are not immediately visible to others.

As a child, I was constantly creating worlds for my younger siblings to step into and share. Sometimes I would ask them to close their eyes and guide them through the yard, building stories from textures, sounds, and imagination. I wanted to make a world that was beautiful enough to hold them.

That impulse continues to shape my work. I want to create a world we always needed but never had. Throughout my career, I have been drawn to people, stories, and ways of knowing that are often overlooked, dismissed, or excluded from dominant cultural narratives. Much of my work is rooted in a desire to create experiences that allow us to encounter lives beyond our own, not as observers, but as participants in a shared human experience. I want to create spaces where people feel safe enough to see and be seen, and where shared experience opens the possibility for true connection.

I am interested in the spaces where language falls short and experience becomes the narrator—where perception, relationship, and shared encounter reveal forms of knowing that cannot be accessed alone. Through this work, some people encounter themselves, while others encounter a world they may never have otherwise known. There are moments when certainty dissolves and something deeper becomes available to us through the body, through relationship, and through shared experience. Those moments remind me that understanding is not always something we arrive at individually. Sometimes it emerges between us.

I am fascinated by perception, by the ways people experience the world differently and by the moments when the “I” becomes an “us.” Through shared experience, I explore what becomes possible when people are invited to enter lives, perspectives, and ways of knowing beyond their own. I am interested in how stories that are not our own can begin to feel familiar, how connection can emerge across difference, and how a room full of strangers can briefly become a community.

I also believe that the way we make work matters as much as the work itself. My creative process is collaborative by design. Rather than creating work for people, I create work with them. Through shared authorship, sensory exploration, and practice-based research, collaborators help shape the artistic process, bringing their lived experiences, expertise, and ways of knowing into the creation of the work. I have always believed that whoever is in the room becomes part of the creation itself. The work is not made by any one person alone; it emerges through encounter, shaped by the relationships, experiences, and perspectives each person brings.

In a world shaped by inherited inequities and assumptions about whose lives, bodies, and ways of knowing are valued, I am interested in creating spaces where people can slow down long enough to encounter one another differently. Spaces where stories can be felt rather than explained; where strangers can recognize themselves in one another; and where understanding might emerge between us. I continue to make work because I believe there are things we can only discover together. Perhaps I am still trying to create a world that is beautiful enough to hold us.