
“Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be part of.” ~Geri Weitzman
Musrara Israel International Festival Artist
Hampton Roads Cultural Alliance "Allie" Award
Virginia 50 for 50 "Exemplary Program and Pinnacle Event"
Bogliasco Foundation Fellow
Culture Hub NYC Micro-residency Artist
Henry Luce Scholar
Fulbright Scholar
US Embassy Research Grant
InLight Richmond People's Choice Award
Chicago Dance Bridge Artist
Links Hall Link-UP Residency Artist
Dance Omi International Residency Artist
Summer Stages Dance Choreographic Fellow
Lemelson Illinois-Technology Innovation Finalist
Kate Neal Kinley Fellow
Moe Family Dance Award

Artist. Scholar. Mover. Maker.
Renata Sheppard
Art is a vehicle for preserving, honoring, and challenging humanness in a technology-driven world. I shift between paradigms: costume is sculpture, scenery performs, audience becomes actor, folding and refolding expectations and roles to build an art form that reflects the pulse of real-life spontaneity and behaviors.
I collect my choreographic ingredients across discipline: re-contextualizing and juxtaposing light, body, material, architecture and technology in a concentrated hyper-reality of emotion, flesh, and spectacle, a cross-breed of performance and installation. I weave fragments of technology, old and new, analog and digital, into my playground: the dialogue between body and its environment.
Every creative project, every research question, collaboration, event, sculpture, costume- is a choreography. Sometimes this choreography involves live performers, sometimes objects, sometimes the audience. After all, what else are we doing everyday except arranging and juxtaposing people, place, technologies, attempting to understand and create relationships and give meaning?
Life is choreography. A living sculpture.
Step, step. Do it.