Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer, dancer, scholar, began presenting concerts of her own work in 1977.  Foster received her BA in anthropology from Swarthmore College, her MA in Dance from UCLA, and her Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from UC/Santa Cruz.  From 1981-1990 she taught as a member of the faculty of the Department of Dance at Wesleyan University.  In 1990 she accepted a position as Chair of the Dance Department at UC/Riverside and an invitation to build the first doctoral level program in Critical Dance Studies in the United States.  The Ph.D. program received final approval in February 1993 and admitted its first class of students in the Fall of that year. 

Ms. Foster's work comments, often humorously, upon the art of making dances.  Anna Kisselgoff of the New York Times has described her as "a new breed of choreographer.  The question Miss Foster asks and which is the 'subject' of her pieces is, what is dance?...What we see is an elegant well-trained body which aims for significance on several levels."  Deborah Jowitt in the Village Voice has commented that her "dances show her interest in subtle distinctions of meaning, in how context and emphasis alter how we read a gesture.

Her work as a choreographer has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts with Choreographer’s Fellowships and by the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations.  Her work as a scholar has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  She is an Honorary Fellow at the Laban Centre in London, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University, the Award for Leadership in the Field from the Congress on Research in Dance, and an Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field from the Dance Studies Association.