Rachel Sweeney

Rachel is an artist-educator, embodied facilitator and movement practitioner whose work spans more than thirty years of collaborative practice across dance, ecology and embodied activism.

Her work explores how movement-based knowledge can help us reimagine our relationship with place, community and planetary wellbeing. Moving fluidly between arts and science, Rachel develops socially progressive, transdisciplinary approaches that bring the body into conversations about sustainability, adaptation and ecological futures.

A practising movement artist and researcher, Rachel focuses on decolonising body–place relationships, engaging creatively with cultural heritage, and situating eco-pedagogy within both environmental health and the creative arts. Her work is grounded in ecological wellbeing as a lived, relational practice …  connecting people to land, to one another, and to the more-than-human world.

Rachel led the MA in Movement, Mind and Ecology at Schumacher College (2021–2024), and is on the core faculty of the newly reimagined Schumacher College, that is now part of the Satish Kumar Foundation. Rachel has taught across Higher Education in the UK and Ireland since 2006, and has held research posts including Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, and Centre Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Futures, University of Plymouth. She is also a member of the Regenerative Learning Network, global consultants in Futures Education.

Her work has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), Creative Ireland, CSIRO Australia, Dartmoor National Park Authority, Teignmouth Town Council and Dance in Devon.

Rachel’s international practice weaves together teaching, art-making, network building and the cultivation of future-fit communities … always rooted in the intelligence of the body and the ethics of care for place.