Susan Whipp is a Professor and Coordinator of Dance in the School of Music and Dance at San Francisco State University. Highly involved with process, Susan teaches Modern Dance II, Choreography I and II, Pilates Mat, and serves as Co-Director of San Francisco State's University Dance Theater.  She has a MA and MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and credits her most memorable company dance experience with the Washington DC, New York, and SF companies of Jan Van Dyke and Dancers (1980-1986).

Putting work on stage has been an engaging life-long process for Susan.   Across her years of training, some of her most influential teachers for composition and technique have been Jan Van Dyke, Claudia Melrose, Xenia Chlistowa, Aaron Osborne, Margaret Jenkins,  Lisa Burnett, and Joe Goode.  Susan has choreographed for the University Dance Theatre for the past twenty years, and speaks passionately of the spirit of collaboration in her favorite works Yes and Styx: Passage. Several years of research on teaching composition and the creative process with Joe Goode have strongly influenced everything.

Susan's approach to teaching is based in process and integration of the mind, body, and spirit. Susan challenges her students to attend to and release into the present, to feel and center the body, and to approach Dance with a strong sense of work ethic. Technique classes are approached from a sense of motion and are taught from a Pilates perspective. Her choreography classes emphasize craft, the felt experience, and the creative process in making the dance idea speak on the stage.