Fiona Bannon began her career as a community dance artist (animateur) after completing the Community Dance programme with Peter Brinson at the Laban Centre (London). She worked with Cheshire Dance Workshop, Merseyside Dance and Clywd Dance Project in North Wales. In the early 1990s, she moved to Australia to work as the Education and Community Officer for Ausdance (NSW). On returning to the UK, she joined the Scarborough School of Arts (University of Hull) as a Lecturer in Dance and Performance. Here she completed her MEd and PhD at the University of Manchester, researching aesthetic development and aesthetic education as an identifying feature of dance taught at degree level in the UK. In 2004 she took on the role of Head of School at Scarborough, and led the development of the School of Arts and New Media. Now as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, she continues to explore collaborative art making, aesthetics and ethics in studio practice.
At Leeds Fiona was a founding member of Architects of the Invisible, a performance collective that explores experimental choreography and social interaction and led a number of projects via Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) Awards, for example Re-Tale Leeds and the DownTownDance Project.
Fiona continues to teach at undergraduate, postgraduate and research levels, works as an external examiner, reviewer and advocate for dance. She frequently writes for dance journals, presents work nationally and internationally at conferences, contributes to daCi (Dance and the Child International), WDA (World Dance Alliance). She became Chair of DanceHE in 2013 and joined the Executive Board of World Dance Alliance in the Autumn of 2014 and is currently supporting the development of WDA-E ( Europe). Current research interests include ethics and aesthetics in practice and the valuing of messy practice in practice-led research.