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Sarah Wilbur
she/hers

Sarah Wilbur (she/hers) is a cross-sector choreographer, educator and arts researcher who studies how economic investments and practices impact labor in the performing arts. 

Sarah Wilbur (she/hers) is an artist-scholar who studies US arts labor and institutional support. Her first book, Funding Bodies: Five Decades of Dance Making at the National Endowment for the Arts (2021) historicized the impact of federal dance funding policies on generations of dance artists. Her second book offers a feminist ethnographic account of the shaping influence of the US health industry on local dance work worlds. Sarah co-edits Arts in Context: Critical Performance Infrastructures (U-Texas Press) and co-facilitates the NEH-funded Research Collaborative “Building Equitable Arts Infrastructures.” She is an Associate Professor of the Practice (Dance) at Duke University.https://scholars.duke.edu/person/sarah.wilbur

A woman on stage giving a presentation.
Essay

What Gets Lost When Federal Arts Funding Gets Gutted

29 May 2025

Many theatremakers across the United States abruptly lost funding for their projects in progress when the National Endowment for the Arts cancelled previously obligated grants. But funds are not the only crucial thing we are losing, as artist-scholar Sarah Wilbur highlights.

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