Erin Brannigan works in the fields of dance, film and the visual arts as an academic. She is of Irish and Danish political exile, convict, and settler descent. Erin was named the national ‘Field Leader of Theatre and Performance Studies’ by The Australian newspaper in the September 2019 special report, Research. Her research explores the condition of dance through its relationship with other art forms in interdisciplinary practices. Generated by specific works of art and art practices, her research covers: dance and the screen arts; gesture as a cross-disciplinary conceptual framework; interdisciplinary compositional strategies of the avant-garde (historic and contemporary); minimalism as a site of disciplinary assertion; and the experiment-experience nexus through a research-workshop practice with local artists. Her first monography from her thesis, Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. Early in her academic career she was part of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant, The Experimental Humanities (2013-2016), with Professor Stephen Muecke and Professor Edward Scheer. New Paradigms for Performance Pedagogies was an education-focused research project in partnership with Dr. Bryoni Trezise (2014-2016) exploring the decolonization of UNSW’s Performing Arts curriculum. She co-founded a Faculty Research Hub in 2015, Intermedial Composition Network, with she continues to convene and co-founded an industry-based group, Writing Dancing, in 2010 with Professor Stephen Muecke which involves artists, students and academics and continues to meet bi-monthly. In 2020, Erin co-founded Dance Research Australia with her postgraduate students which continues to operate and grow under new convenorship.

Her more recent research project, Dance and the Visual Arts: Composition : Experiment : Sensation, involves academic and creative research associates nationally and internationally, publications including articles, books and an online industry resource, and creative commissions. She was Lead CI on an associated industry-based project, Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum - Exhibiting, Curating, Collecting and Conserving Dance (ARC Linkage Grant 2021-2024), which included partners at Tate UK, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art, and Perth Institute of the Arts and attracted funding of nearly $400,000 and in-kind support of $600 000. This has lead to a new research network, Dance Archives and the Museum, with Tate, AGNSW, NAISDA, and independents Shelley Lasica and Zoe Theodore, and is currently supported through the UNSW Global Ventures grant program. This archival work dovetails with Dancing Sydney: Mapping Movements: Performing Histories, an ongoing partnership since 2016 with colleagues at Sydney University, Macquarie University and the State Library of NSW, working to secure the legacy of NSW-based dance artists through innovative archiving strategies. An exhibition, In Response: Dialogues with RealTime (UNSW Library Exhibition Space, 25 Feb to 25 April 2019) is one outcome of this work alongside a new suite of Oral Histories (2020-) commissioned by the State Library of NSW and a new dance reviewing platform, DS Reviews.

Erin is on the editorial board of The International Journal of Screendance and is a member of the Dance Studies Association and the American Society for Aesthetics. She was the founding Director of ReelDance (1999-2008) and has curated dance screen programs and exhibitions for Sydney Festival 2008, Melbourne International Arts Festival 2003 and international dance screen festivals. Most recently she was commissioned to curate retrospectives of Australian dance films for Performance Space in Sydney, Bright City Lights on the Gold Coast, and Dancehouse in Melbourne (2024-2025).