Dr. Miriam Giguere

Project Director · Performing Arts Department Head at Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design

Dr. Miriam Giguere directed the dance program at Drexel University from 1992-2015, before becoming Department Head for Performing Arts in 2015. She teaches academic dance classes in 20th Century Dance History, Dance Pedagogy, and Dance Criticism and Aesthetics, alongside studio courses in modern dance. Also in this capacity, she directs the Drexel University Dance Ensemble, a 55 dancer company, and FreshDance, a freshmen only company of 35 dancers, both of which perform two professional caliber dance concerts each year at the Mandell Theater.

Giguere graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania earning both a BA in psychology and an MS in education in four years. She earned her PhD in dance from Temple University, where she was awarded the Emerging Doctoral Scholar award. Her dissertation was recognized nationally by the American Educational Research Association with their 2009 National Dissertation Award for Arts and Learning. Her research has been published in Research in Dance Education, Arts Education Policy Review, Journal of Dance Education, Arts & Learning Journal, International Journal of Education and the Arts, Selected Dance Research Volume 6, and Public Scholarship in Dance. Giguere was the keynote speaker for Dance Education Conference 2010, Singapore, an invited presenter at the Dance and the Child International conferences in Taiwan in 2012, and in Copenhagen in 2015. She is an associate editor of the journal Dance Education in Practice where she writes a regular column entitled “Dance Trends”. Giguere is also a peer reviewer for the Journal of Dance Education, the Journal of Emerging Dance Research, and the author of the textbook Beginning Modern Dance, published in 2013 through Human Kinetics. She is currently serving on the board of the National Dance Education Organization.