About Philip Szporer
Montreal-based filmmaker, writer, and lecturer, Philip Szporer, has been immersed in the Canadian dance world for close to 40 years. He teaches in both the Contemporary Dance department and the Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability at Concordia University.
In 2001, Philip along with Marlene Millar, co-founded the Montréal-based award-winning media arts production company, Mouvement Perpétuel, co-directing and co-producing documentaries, short dance films, and installations to great acclaim. Works include a stereoscopic (3D) live action/animated film Lost Action: Trace, created with choreographer Crystal Pite and animator Theodore Ushev; 1001 Lights, a gallery/museum installation; Bhairava, a site-specific dance-for-camera film, featuring dancer and choreographer Shantala Shivalingappa; and MABOUNGOU: Being in the World, a recently completed documentary on the life and times of dancer-choreographer-philosopher Zab Maboungou.
Philip has also served as artistic advisor for interactive exhibits and installations, including the Corps rebelles/Rebel Bodies exhibition, Musée de civilisation (Québec City), and the Regroupement québecois de danse Toile Mémoire interactive map project. In 2018, he co-founded Dance + Words, with Kathleen Smith, a collective dedicated to developing ideas and facilitate conversations around cultural discourse, such as the Wikipedia Dance Project.
Literacy activism around the discipline of dance and dance-film remains at the heart of Philip’s practice, and has taken him around the globe. He’s guided dance-film workshops, worked as a choreographic facilitator, mentored emerging artists, conducted writing workshops, and facilitated a multitude of audience engagement activities.
As a broadcast journalist, he has worked at CBC Radio, been dance commentator for Radio-Canada’s arts magazine Aux arts, etc., and served as Canadian correspondent for The World (BBC/WGBH-Boston). Dance writings have been published in The Dance Current, Tanz, and Dance Magazine, among others. Further publications include scholarly essays and chapters in Motion Pictures: Dance’s Duet with the Camera (Palgrave Macmillan), Envisioning Dance on Film and Video (Routledge), and the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (Oxford University Press).
Philip was recognized in 1999 with a Pew Fellowship (National Dance/Media Project), at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was awarded the Jacqueline Lemieux Prize, in recognition of exceptional achievements in dance, by the Canada Council of the Arts in 2010. In 2016, he was presented a Distinguished Teaching Award bestowed by Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts.