From 1981-1997 she served as a jury member for choreographic competitions of the Fédération Internationale de Danse, and the Groningen and Bagnolet competitions. She gained sponsorship for Looking at Dances (1998), Dance Words (1995) and Dance and the Performative (2002) and acted as choreographic mentor in the Netherlands and Belgium.
She has been a guest artist in universities and festivals in North and South America, Europe, Australia and Japan.
In 2008 she collaborated with the William Forsythe Company to create an interactive web-based method of recording Forsythe’s creative processes in his making of The Loss of Small Detail project. Her recent work focused on Laban's groundbreaking dance theatre experiments in the 1920s and, in collaboration from dance and music artists from Trinity Laban London, she has directed radical recreations for today’s culture of dance theatre works from his repertoire of the 1920's.
She opened Beechmont Movement Study Centre (1967-1971) providing specialist courses in dance and dance notation (Labanotation and Motif Writing) and collaborating with Her Majesty's Inspectors of Education on the possibility of designing the first BA (Hons) degree course in Dance in the UK. After a short break for her family (she has a son and daughter), she retrained (1977-1981) gaining an Adv Diploma in Education, a MA(dist) in Movement Studies and a PHD in Choreology concurrently teaching and researching at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance.
Biography
Dr Valerie Preston-Dunlop with Professor Anthony Bowne, Director of Trinity Laban
