Dr. Pegge Vissicaro is Director of the Office for Global Dance Research and Creative Partnerships, which facilitates School of Dance sponsored research projects. As faculty, she teaches and/or co-teaches the courses, Dance, Culture, and Global Contexts, Dances of Brazil and the Caribbean, the Third-Year Seminar focusing on community dance, and First-Year Movement Practices. Her instruction is informed by long-term investigations of cross-cultural processes, popular dance cultures in Brazil, refugee studies, and online learning environments. In 2008, Vissicaro was a recipient of the first ASU Global Engagement Faculty Seed Grant to develop a major archival preservation and access proposal for the National Endowment for the Humanities and to design a social networking site linking dance research "in the field." In 2009, she was awarded a Herberger College Faculty Research Grant to explore Arizona-based community dance knowledge in the two-day seminar Knowing Place, create publications, and develop curriculum, specifically focusing on refugees, arts, and community. Also Vissicaro is part of the faculty team to receive funding for their project, Festivals in the Americas as Utopic/Dystopic Sites for Social Transformation as part of the 2009-2010 Institute for Humanities Research Research Fellow Program. Fall 2009, she will begin a three-year federally funded grant in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee to explore dance as a healing mechanism for survivors of torture. Significant publications include her widely distributed textbook, Studying Dance Cultures around the World: an Introduction to Multicultural Dance Education, articles in the peer-reviewed journals Ethnic Studies Review, Australia New Zealand Dance Research Society, Multimedia Tools and Applications, and The Review of Human Factor Studies, as well as the magazine, Animated. Vissicaro was a Fulbright Scholar at the Universidade Tecnica de Lisboa (UTL) and Instituto Politecnico de Lisboa from 1996-1997 and a Fulbright Specialist at UTL in 2008. Notably she is a pioneer of distance education for dance and launched the first online courses for ASU in 1996, which also were the first in dance worldwide. She has presented papers and lectures, taught master classes and conducted residencies in Korea, Scotland, Portugal, France, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, and throughout the United States. She is president of Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Inc. and executive director of Terra Dance, a site specific performance company. Additionally, she is a consultant for Tempe Public Schools and other educational organizations in which she designs multicultural dance curriculum and special events. She also initiated and directed the first multicultural festival at ASU in 1988, which continues to be an annual event promoting international awareness on campus. Vissicaro received a B.F.A. in Dance with a specialization in performance and choreography from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1978); an M.F.A. in Dance with a specialization in performance and choreography from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, (1981); and a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in educational media and computers, from Arizona State University (2003).