Carol McDowell is an interdisciplinary dance and performance artist, collaborator, scholar, and educator. She was born in California, grew up a haole in Hawai’i, lived in the downtown arts community of NYC from 1979-1991, and has been part of the LA dance and performance since 1998. McDowell creates movement scores and performance events concerned with presence, compassion, and difference. Falling in love with modern dance in classes with Betty Jones, she completed a B.A. in Dance and Design from Bennington College. Since then, McDowell has jumped from an airplane in Tim Miller’s Cost of Living, and danced Kei Takei’s Light, Jack Moore’s Four Songs, Pooh Kaye’s Active Graphics, Barbara Dilley’s Naked Face, Victoria Mark’s Medium Big Inefficient Considerably Imbalanced Dance, co-creator alexx shilling’s Be Cool on stage and screen (with Taso Papdakis), and Laurel Jenkins’s B.A.S.E. at the Getty. Additionally, she has performed in works by Kevin Williamson, Jmy Kidd, Nickels Sunshine, Christine Suarez, Rebecca Alson Milkman, Ari Hoffman, Cheng-Chieh Yu, Cid Pearlman, Karen Finley, Yvonne Meier, Yoshiko Chuma, Poppo, John Bernd, and Phoebe Neville. Collaborations include projects with Asher Hartman, Mariel Carranza, Jerri Allen & Inez Bush. Her choreography has been presented at Highways, Pieter, Looking Left/Santa Cruz, iDFest-RxArt-Dance Moving Forward/Electric Lodge, Craftswoman House, Skirball Cultural Center, Sweeney Art Gallery, Anatomy Riot, Platinum Oasis, and FAIRY/Side Street Projects in LA, CA, The Kitchen, Dance Theater Workshop, and Performance Space 122 in NYC, NY and abroad in Indonesia and Europe. Grants and artist residencies have come from Hothouse/UCLA, Makassar Arts Forum, Tari Riau, Indonesian Dance Festival, National Dance/Media Fellowship, APPEX, Djerassi Foundation, Colorado Arts Council, Boulder Arts Commission, Aesthetic Education Institute of Colorado, Jerome Foundation, DIA Art Foundation, Working in the Kitchen and Hawaii Department of Education.

Also known for her lighting design, McDowell received a 2002 Lester Horton Award for her collaboration with Victoria Marks on Against Ending and a 1985 BESSIE for her work with John Bernd on Be Good To Me. From 1991-1998 she served as Director of the Performing Arts Center at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado where she co-founded the Mariposa Collective with Barbara Dilley, Diane Butler, and Polly Motley. Here in LA, McDowell continues to Encounter with Mariel Carranza, served as the Internship Coordinator and Super for Pieter PASD, co-founded max10 performance lab at the Electric Lodge with Cid Pearlman, David King, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario and Nurit Siegel, and was co-curator of Crazy Space and performance series at Sea and Space Explorations and Kristi Engel Gallery with Asher Hartman, and worked with Sharon Kinney to document dance and performance in LA as Dancing Camera. McDowell received her M.F.A. in Dance/Choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and completed her exams for a Ph.D. (abd) in Culture and Performance. She continues to teach dance and performance studies, composition, improvisation, somatic movement and yoga at several colleges, including UCLA, CSULB, Rio Hondo College, and West LA College.