Dr Rebecca Stancliffe
Dr Rebecca Stancliffe
Dr Rebecca Stancliffe is a Research Fellow focusing on creative health, co-creation, co-production and peer-led enquiry, and digital media. Rebecca teaches across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in dance and dance science in the areas of dance technique, contextual studies, and research methods.
Research areas and areas of supervision
• Dance for health, arts and health
• Co-creation, co-production, and peer-led enquiry
• Online and blended environments for learning and creative practice
• Philosophy of technology and digital methods
• Dance notation, scoring, documentation
• Dance history
Biography
Rebecca is an artist-scholar specialising in the documentation and mediation of experience through digital media and methods. She is interested in the role of media for performance scholarship and for our everyday lives. Rebecca’s monograph Video Annotation in Dance and Performance (2025, Palgrave Macmillan) explores how we can work with time-based media to develop the analytic capacity and deep attention of human (rather than computational) subjects. The book examines video markup as a reflective, analytic, organisational, and publishing tool for performance scholarship.
In the area of arts and health, Rebecca’s work explores bodily understanding and knowledge, epistemic justice and somatic authority, and lived experience. She is the Principal Investigator for The Language of Pain (2023-2026), which gives ‘voice’ to the indivisible and often denied experience of chronic illness and pain. The research, which uses arts-based methods for the expression of pain narratives, also examines the democratisation of knowledge production through co-constructed research practices. Rebecca is interested in the productive ambiguity of arts-based methods and how they draw attention to the nuance and complexity of experience. Rebecca’s research also explores the potential of online and blended environments for community arts practice, seeking to position them as neither secondary nor inferior to in-person experiences.
Rebecca is co-editor of special issues of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (Training for Movement, Physical Activity and Health 2025) and International Journal of Performance Arts & Digital Media (Digital Annotation and the Understanding of Bodily Practices 2021). Rebecca’s work has been published in edited books (Intellect, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge) and journals including International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, and Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.
Rebecca is an editorial board member for International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media. She is a peer reviewer for the AHRC, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Choreographic Practices, Journal of Dance Education, and Thinking, Skills and Creativity.
Rebecca has a BA (Hons) in Dance Theatre with First Class Honours from Laban (2008) and an MA in Dance with Distinction from London Contemporary Dance School (2010). She completed her PhD at the Centre of Dance Research in 2019.
Selected publications, reports, and media
Stancliffe, R., Asante, T., Atkinson, T., Barber, R., Hirtz, M., Mackie, C., Miller, R., Nagle, P., Rivoal, D., Saunders, E., and Young J. (2026). The Language of Pain: Online creative research centring lived experience and experiential knowledge. Trinity Laban.
Frey, E. (filmmaker), Stancliffe, R., Asante, T., Atkinson, T., Barber, R., Hirtz, M., Mackie, C., Miller, R., Nagle, P., Rivoal, D., Saunders, E., and Young J. (2026). The Language of Pain [multimedia film]. YouTube.
Harman, G. (Host), Stancliffe, R., Barber, R., and Young, J. (2026, August 7). The Language of Pain: Stories, Bodies and the Knowledge of Experience [Audio podcast episode]. ResDance.
Stancliffe, R. (2025). Video annotation in dance and performance: Attention, thinking and thinking. Palgrave Macmillan.
Edinborough, C., Glen, Z., Pringle, A., & Stancliffe. R. (2025). Editorial: Training for movement, physical activity and health. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 16(2).
Stancliffe, R., Wakeling, K., Evans, L. & Howard, S. (2022) ‘Beyond the Walls’: The Artist-Researcher and Performative Dissemination. In R. Prior & T. Fischer (Eds.) Applied Arts and Health, Education and Community: Building Bridges. Intellect.
Chappell, K., Redding, E., Crickmay, U., Stancliffe, R., Jobbins, V., & Smith, S. (2021). The aesthetic, artistic and creative contributions of dance to health and wellbeing across the lifecourse: A systematic review. International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Wellbeing, 16(1).
deLahunta, S., Rittershaus, D., & Stancliffe, R. (2021) Editorial. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 17(1), 1-6.
Stancliffe, R. (2021) Differentiating (an)notation practices: an artist-scholar’s observation. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 17(1), 69-85.
Stancliffe, R. (2021) Moving (together) in a distributed setting: The impact of online music and dance delivery for older adults’ lived experience. In L. Bissell & L. Weir (Eds.) Performance in a Pandemic. Routledge.
Stancliffe, R. (2019) Training the Analytical Dance Eye: Video Annotation for Dance. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 10(2), 273-288.
Stancliffe, R. (2018) Video Annotation for the Articulation and Transmission of Dance. In S. Ellis, H. Blades, & C. Waelde, C. (Eds.) A World of Muscle, Bone and Organs. Coventry University, pp. 358-381.
Stancliffe, R. (2018) Mediating and Visualising Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine. In S. Whatley, R. K. Cisneros, & A. Sabiescu (Eds.) Digital Echoes: Spaces for Intangible and Performance-based Cultural Heritage. Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 213-230.