Susan L. Wiesner received her BA in Dance from Goucher College and her MA and PhD from the University of Surrey, England. Dr. Wiesner was granted two CLIR (Council for Library and Information Resources) postdoctoral fellowships to the University of Virginia and the University of North Carolina–Greensboro where she managed digital projects in the libraries and lectured in dance history and research methods. Her ongoing project, ARTeFACT, has been presented at several academic conferences (both Dance and Digital Humanities), been awarded an NEH Digital Start-up Grant, and has been featured in book chapters and journal articles. Dr. Wiesner was awarded an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship for 2011 to pursue research into movements representative of conceptual metaphor. She has conducted research into metadata and the development of ontologies for the performing arts using Digital Humanities methodologies and has developed a database of dance publications. A choreographer and dancer, Dr. Wiesner has presented her work in both the US and the UK, written as a dance critic, taught at several universities, and continues to work with intersections of language and movement in an attempt to develop automated tagging of movement in dance film.
In her spare time, she is the Executive/Artistic Director for Range of Motion Dance in Charlottesville Virginia, a company of adult dancers with special needs which is dedicated to the belief that all people can dance. Wiesner earned her Certification in Movement Analysis (CMA) from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies and is the LIMS Archivist/Historian. At MITH, Wiesner is Principal Faculty Specialist for the Performing Arts where she manages projects focusing on the Performing Arts and teaches a course in the Digital Humanities and Embodied knowledge. Her current research focuses on movement and notation systems as a means of machine learning and transfer of data between artistic forms.
