Dance Alumna Sharon McCaman’s Dance Shorts Festival Completes its Fifth Year

Monday, June 25, 2018

USF dance alumna Sharon McCaman's Dance Shorts: College Film Festival has completed its 5th year.

The festival, which McCaman founded during her undergraduate studies at USF, provides dancers with an exciting outlet to share their compositions for adjudication and, if selected, at the festival gala.

Dance Shorts is a festival that focuses solely on dance for camera, or screendance. Dancers submit their dance short films, which can be categorized as narrative, experimental, or abstract, and they are adjudicated anonymously by an online panel of judges.

Instead of performing dance compositions on stage, screendance allows dancers new creative possibilities while preserving their works to be viewed again and again, without regard to time and location like traditional dance performances for the stage.

This year, 18 films from 11 universities were chosen by judges to be shown at the Festival Gala, which was held in February 2018.

McCaman earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance from USF in 2015.

As a student at USF, McCaman spent her time immersed in the arts both on stage at USF and in the broader community. During her undergraduate degree program at USF, she performed choreographic works by faculty and guest artists, served as Vice President and Marketing Director of Student Dance Production, and was a member of the Dance Education Organization at USF.

Her digital magazine "Oh, Merde!" brought attention to dance and awareness of arts in the community. In 2015, she received the prestigious John L Smith award from the College of The Arts.

She recently earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in Dance, Interdisciplinary Digital Media, and Performance from Arizona State University. For her master's thesis titled No Doors, she converted an old ratio station space into what she refers to as an interactive, reactive, immersive art installation

No Doors exhibited January 12 through January 21 at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.

For more on McCaman, visit her website.