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Course Collaborations

Course Collaborations

The Movement Lab partners with departments each semester to support classes across Barnard and Columbia. Our modular space, embodied-learning environment, and technical resources give faculty and students room to explore, experiment, and learn through doing.

CURRENT

Fall 2026

Semester Courses

  • Screendance: Composition — Gabri Christa (Barnard Dance)
    This experiential, hands-on course requires all students to choreograph, dance, and film. Focusing on single-shot filmmaking, the duet of the camera and the dance will create an understanding of the interaction between the two, enabling students to create a final short film.
  • Human Anatomy and Movement — Chisa Hidaka (Barnard Dance)
    Dancers and other movers will acquire concrete, scientific information about anatomy and integrate this knowledge into their sensed experience of movement. Through readings, lectures/discussions and movement practice, students will explore: (1) structure and function of bones and joints, (2) muscles, neuromuscular function and coordination, (3) motor cognition and learning.
  • Movement Analysis — Danielle Kipnis (Barnard Dance)
    An introduction to the theories and methods of movement analysis, focusing on its application to dance performance and research. Through lectures, readings, integrative movement exercises, and observation labs, students will learn to analyze and describe the qualitative aspects of human movement; to notate movement in motif writing; and to refine their ability to move efficiently and expressively.

Workshops / Final Presentations

  • Planetary Media — Amelyn Ng (GSAPP Columbia)
    This Representation seminar has students collectively make and project a large-scale digital-physical architectural drawing of the "critical zone," the kilometer above and below ground. Working in thematic groups (geo, hydro, bio, atmo), they develop "deep sections" for test-projection at the Barnard Movement Lab. Using Blender and drawing techniques, they explore how architectural sections can offer new ways of reading the planet.

  • The Immersive Room — Clara Kraft (Barnard Architecture)
    Optical instruments and their technologies have profoundly shaped our perception of both the built and natural environment. By extending our vision beyond what the naked eye can perceive, these tools have not only altered how we see but also how we conceptualize space. Today, emerging technologies allow us to capture, analyze, and visualize spaces in unprecedented ways. This class explores how these optical advancements inform architectural design, focusing on the creation of immersive virtual reality (VR) environments.

  • Live Code Jam Session — Mark Santolucito (Barnard Computer Science)
    Mark Santolucito's course, Computational Sound, welcomes you to a Live Code Jam Session. Students will perform with Sonic Pi on live-coded audio and Hydra on live-coded visuals. Come learn how you can use your laptop as an instrument! Jam sessions will take place at the Movement Lab on selected dates throughout the semester.


Spring 2026

Workshops / Final Presentations

  • Music, Architecture + The Body — Marlon J. Davis (Barnard Architecture)
    Anchored in Iannis Xenakis's writings and projects linking music and architecture, this course treats space as something to be performed and tested through sound. Because both are perceived sequentially through the body, students use 4D motion capture, Gaussian splatting, photogrammetry, point clouds, and animation, in collaboration with Barnard's Movement Lab, to reimagine the relationship between humans and technology.
  • Memory in Motion — Nathan Gorelick (Barnard English)
    This project is a collective artistic reply to Aniara, Harry Martinson's 1956 cantos and its 2018 film, about a drifting spaceship whose passengers seek refuge in Mima, an AI that broadcasts happier memories. With the Movement Lab, students recreate that experience, projecting photos of personal "happy places" in three dimensions, then discussing them together alongside poetry, imagery, and sound.
  • Translating the Animal — Hana Worthen and Chisa Hidaka (Barnard Comparative Literature & Dance)
    This seminar explores how translation, language, and reason have historically worked together to maintain speciesism, preventing human animals from perceiving their commonalities with, and attunement to, sentient nonhuman beings.
  • AI & Photography — Alexey Yurenev (Columbia Visual Arts)
    This class examines AI photography as the latest disruption in a long history of mechanical image-making, from Walter Benjamin onward. It explores the ethics and aesthetics of AI imagery, including authorship, creativity, and dataset bias, arguing that an equitable global image-bank cannot be left to algorithms and entrepreneurs. Students balance reading and writing with learning new software and tools.

PAST

Semester Courses

  • Movement Analysis — Catherine Haber and various instructors (Barnard Dance)
  • Rehearsal and Performance — NiNi Dongnier (Barnard/Columbia Dance)
  • Choreographic Interventions: Coding Choreography — Mimi Yin and NiNi Dongnier (Barnard/Columbia Dance & NYU ITP)

Workshops / Final Presentations

  • History of Theatrical Dance — Seth Stewart Williams (Barnard Dance)
  • Sound: Advanced Topics — Mark Santolucito (Barnard Computer Science)
  • Composing for Dance — Zosha di Castri (Columbia Music)
  • Techniques of Live Sound — David Adamcyk (Columbia Computer Music Center)
  • Performance Art — Liz Magic Laser (Columbia Visual Arts)
  • Lighting Workshop — Guy De Lancey within Intro to Moving Image: Video, Film & Art (Columbia Visual Arts)