Dr. Anthony Shay received a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from California State University, Los Angeles, and a Master of Arts degree from UCLA in Folklore and Mythology. He is the first recipient in North America of the Ph.D. in Dance History & Theory from the University of California, Riverside. He has published numerous articles in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Dance, the Journal of Iranian Studies, Dance Research Journal, and the Journal of Visual Anthropology, and his new book, Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World published by Mazda Publishers, appears this month.

For over 45 years he has produced numerous choreographies of Iranian dance. For this activity in 1998, Dr. Shay received the highest award for choreography in California, the James Irvine Foundation Fellowship Award. In 1999, he received the Dance Resource Center of Greater Los Angeles Lester Horton award for Outstanding Achievement for the Staging of Traditional Dance. He is a five-time recipient of choreographic fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has recently been awarded the prestigious Social Science Research Council Fellowship to conduct research in the Middle East.

For a list of his choreographic works click here.