MembroLauraShannon

Ariadne Institute Library, Carol P Christ Collection

Having devoted my life to researching and teaching traditional women’s circle dances for over 35 years, I am honoured to be seen as one of the ‘grandmothers’ of the worldwide Sacred/Circle Dance movement. I hold university qualifications in Intercultural Studies, Dance Movement Therapy, and Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, and am currently a PhD candidate researching women’s ritual dances as a somatic practice in history and the present day. I have served on the faculty of the Findhorn Foundation Sacred Dance Department since 1998; I am Founding Director of the Athena Institute for Women’s Dance and Culture; I have published numerous articles and book chapters about women's ritual dance; and in 2018 I was named an honorary lifetime member of the Sacred Dance Guild in recognition of my 'significant and lasting contribution to dance as a sacred art'. In 2021, before she passed away, my friend and mentor Carol P. Christ asked me to succeed her as Director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, leading the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete. She also named me her literary executor and bequeathed me her extensive library of books on feminist theology, Goddess spirituality, and modern matriarchal studies. These books form the heart of the Carol P. Christ Collection of the Ariadne Institute Library.