About

Shira Kagan-Shafman is a dancer, choreographer and multidisciplinary artist. She has performed and shared her own work in theaters and museums around New York including, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Triskelion Arts, Arts on Site, Poster House museum, Green Space and Spring for Spring Dance Festival. She premiered her work, Anchor in Continuum, in collaboration with violinist Leandria Lott at Poster House museum and they continue to restage the work throughout the city. She was a recipient of the 2023 B. Wilson Foundation grant, for which she produced two works at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Last summer she joined the esteemed Aston Magna Music Festival for their performances of Igor Stravinksky's L'Histoire du Soldat and she was thrilled to be in residency at Mother's Milk in Fall 2023. 

In August 2021, she participated in Arts on Site Residency in process for her work, To Breathe Over Seas, which premiered at Arts on Site in December 2021 and was restaged in March 2022. Kagan-Shafman has performed in works by Joanna Kotze, Mariana Valencia, Noa Zuk, Roni Chadash, Caitlin Corbett, Kelley Donovan, Rose Pasquarello Beauchamp, Peggy Florin, Dean Moss, Rebecca Stenn, and jess pretty. 

Kagan-Shafman grew up in the Boston area and began her dance training at Ballet Arts Center and the Dance Place, and later attended the Cambridge School of Weston. She additionally attended intensives through Summer Stages at Concord Academy under the tutelage of Richard Colton and Amy Spencer. There her teachers included Seán Curran, Teri Weksler, Daniel McCusker and Marissa Palley.

She received her Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in Contemporary Dance from the New School, where she studied under Nia Love, Rebecca Stenn, Janet Panetta, Stacy Spence and Neil Greenberg. She also spent a semester studying in Israel at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and Hebrew University through DanceJerusalem. There her studies included Ballet, Cunningham Technique and Gaga as well as learning Ohad Naharin repertory, including sections of Sadeh 21, Mamootot, Hora, and Last Work and dancing in new works by Roni Chadash and Noa Zuk.