Dr. Margaret Jean Mather Westby is an artist, researcher, and educator currently in the position of Lecturer of Dance Studies at the University of Malta. She previously taught at the University of West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago and Metropolitan College of New York in The Bronx, New York . Her expertise area of research explores dance and technology through research-creation methodologies and interdisciplinary studies. Her teaching and research interests include dance and somatic practices, critical race, post-colonial, queer/feminist aesthetic practices and studies, science and technology studies, history and theory of communications, dance, interactive media, sound, film, technology, and digital performance.

As a techno-feminist dancer, her work investigates the hybridization of bodily movement and machine-based actions by collaborating on international, multidisciplinary artistic projects. This has led to over 20 collaborative, artistic projects in Austria, Canada, Finland, United Kingdom, and United States and 20 publications and conferences (across Canada, the US, the UK, Greece, and Spain) including Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference, EASST, AdaCamp, Dance Studies Association, and Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts (DRHA), to name a few. She has received funding to research and present her artistic work from Hexagram Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts, Design, Technology, and Digital Culture and Studio XX, a media arts and multimedia resource centre for women.

Hailing from Detroit, Michigan, she has been involved in dance from a young age and received professional training in ballet, modern, and contemporary dance. She attended Interlochen Arts Academy as a dance major and the independent study program at the Ailey School in New York City. She studied digital performance through earlier degrees in New York City (BA Marymount Manhattan College) and in London, England (MA Brunel University). Her certifications include: 500-hour Yoga Alliance Teacher Training from Modo Yogo, American Ballet National Training Curriculum, Laban Movement Analysis and Language of Dance for Dance Educators, Horton Technique Beginning Level, and from UWI’s Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

She received her PhD, entitled Empowering the Female Machine: Re-Mapping Dynamics in Technologically Augmented Dance Performance, under the supervision of advisors Dr. Christopher Salter, Dr. Krista Geneviève Lynes, and Dr. Mark Sussman. For the PhD degree, she received the Concordia University Full Tuition Recruitment Award and Concordia University Faculty of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship. Her research question asks: in collaborative projects involving dance and technology, how do issues of agency, materiality, and gendered subjectivity arise, operate, and govern both research and development and the production processes? Her PhD research-creation project, Orbital Resonance, was conceived as a feminist intervention toward the development of new choreographic methods for sonic, responsive environments and toward the design of technology informed by and for the body.

She has been engaged with technology in corporate environments in her employment history as well. She has worked for such companies as Fuse Television, Universal Motown Records Group, and AOL Television.  In addition to her personal film projects, she has also participated in the Ripfest Film Festival, worked as the Digital Imaging Technician for the short film, “The Waiting Man”, competed in 60secondsdance.dk 2011, and participated in Globe Trot, a collaboration with filmmaker Mitchell Rose and choreographer Bebe Miller.

She can be reached at mwestby828 [at] gmail.com.