Dr Deborah Williams is an American dancer and dance scholar. She received her early training in Indiana where she was a student with Carolyn Miller, James Franklin, the Fort Wayne Ballet, and Butler University Jordan College of Performing Arts. Deborah holds a BA in Dance with a focus on education and community partnerships from Smith College (Five College Dance Department), an MA in Dance Anthropology, and a PhD Dance, both from the University of Roehampton, London.

Deborah has worked for the Centre for Dance Education at the Boston Ballet as a contributor to CityDance and John Hancock Arts in Schools programmes. She was a scholarship recipient at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival for their Dance and Community Partnerships course, and later assisted with both this and their Curriculum in Motion programme. In 2000 Deborah moved to Baltimore, Maryland (USA) where she was an inaugural teaching member of Moving America: Maryland, a three year grant funded study in dance integrated education. She has collaborated on projects with the Maryland Institute College of Art, Towson University, the Ford Foundation, Arts Education in Maryland Schools, Celeste Miller & Co, the Heifetz Summer Music Institute, to name a few. Over her career she has taught dance in all forms to people of all abilities, backgrounds and educational levels.

In 2012 Deborah moved to London, UK to pursue her doctoral studies. While there, she served as the UK coordinator for the Erasmus Mundus programme Choreomundus: Master in dance knowledge, practice, and heritage. She was also employed as a visiting lecturer at the University of Roehampton and the Rambert School. In 2018, she completed her PhD, titled, ‘Finding Their Dance: A study of the narratives and claims of alterations of belief systems amongst non-professional dancers’, also at the University of Roehampton, supervised by Professor Andrée Grau and Professor Ann David. Her research is rooted in the fields of dance anthropology, ethnography, and oral history, and centres around highlighting the voices of non-professional dancers. Her current research is titled Social Value/Valuing The Social, and is a multi-year oral history project profiling “everyday” dancers.

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