Bio and Artist’s Statement
All her adult life, Peggy Brightman has been engaged in and has explored relationships among different artistic media like dance and music, and photography and poetry.
She performed and taught dance professionally for over 30 years, including ten years performing work by noted choreographers with the Concert Dance Company of Boston, a National Touring Company. She presented her own choreography in New York City and in Darmstadt and Stuttgart, Germany.
Peg began studying drawing and ceramic sculpture during graduate studies at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she earned her EdD in Arts in Education in 1993. Later she expanded her studies to include stone sculpture, print-making and photography, and exhibited her work across the Northeast.
Since moving to Vermont in 2012, Peg continued choreographic projects with her company, Moving Spirit, a small dance ensemble performing in the Upper Valley area and across the state in Vermont Dance Alliance Gala Showcases.
In 2015 she began studying and writing poetry intensively and has published her work in the Wednesday Poets: A Collection (2020), with Poets Reading the News, and as part of yearly spring Poemtown celebrations in Poultney, Randolph, St. Johnsbury, and Montpelier, Vermont (2016-present).
In 2020, Peg and videographer Carla Kimball created a film that integrated poetry and dance, Our Voices, Bodies Rising, celebrating the Centennial of Women’s Suffrage. The film project involved over forty local dancers, actors and musicians and was premiered at the Junction Dance Festival in Corinth, Vermont (2021). Peg and Carla later produced an accompanying documentary that describes the uniquely collaborative and innovative approach required of the film makers and participants by the pandemic.
A long-time member of The Daily Artists Group at Artistree in So. Pomfret, Vermont, Peg has been exploring ekphrastic relationships between her own photographs and poetry– fascinated with the cross-fertilization between words and images. Peg’s long-term goal is to complete and share a body of work of paired poems and images “in conversation.”