Sara K. Schneider completed her undergraduate education at Yale and her masters and Ph.D. at New York University in the field of Performance Studies, which brings together the arts and cross-cultural studies. She devised and directed original performance works for Chaparral, the New York theatre company she founded. As a performance anthropologist, she is widely traveled, studying in their native context South Indian martial arts and Balinese and Javanese dance.

Sara’s three published books deal with the meanings of the body in expressive culture. The newest of these, Art of Darkness: Ingenious Performances by Undercover Operators, Con Men, and Others, is featured at www.cuneiformbooks.com. She writes the e-zine/blog Skin in the Game for a wide audience, illuminating the role of the body in performance, learning, culture, work, and spiritual practice. Critics have called her work “keenly intelligent and thoroughly engaging,” “beautifully written,” and “a most valuable contribution to the ethnographic literature.”

Sara is a veteran creator of unique experiential learning events that draw on her performance and anthropological backgrounds to engage participants and expand their worlds and skills. Her original workshops and presentations, ranging from 1.5 hours to 2.5 days, cultivate the performance and cross-cultural skills needed by professionals in education, healthcare, law enforcement, and spiritual leadership.

   Arising out of public attention to her book on undercover work, Art of Darkness, The Art of Undercover has been responsible for the training of law enforcement officers across the country anticipating or working in undercover assignments.

   Participants in The Bodies of "Others": Compassionate Cross-Cultural Care cultivate their sensitivity to the increasingly diverse needs and expectations of patients and families in the multicultural physical dramas of examination, consultation, and treatment rooms.

   Kinesthetic Intelligences for Teachers and District Administrators offers educators direct experience of and insight about the power of direct, body-based learning for people of every age, and suggests the manifold ways it can be incorporated across the curriculum.

   For clergy and spiritual seekers, The Song of the Body and Rehearsals of Death explore global spiritual practices that invoke body movement and body-based imagery as means of spiritual transformation. Participants gain in practices that enhance their spiritual lives and direction of others and in their understanding of spiritual cultures different from their own.

Sara also devises artful working retreats that, in 1 to 2 days, enable organizations to engage and motivate teams to act for change. See client list.

In her home town of Chicago, she teaches working teachers how to improve their teaching by looking at their classrooms as living cultures in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at National-Louis University, and people of all shapes and ages how to practice yoga. She can be reached at sks@thinkingdr.com.