Dance Professor’s Project Receives Blue Diamond Award

Video Collaboratory LLC, a company founded by dance professor Sybil Huskey and computing faculty Celine Latulipe and David Wilson, with doctoral student Vikas Singh, has received the Blue Diamond “Cool Innovation” Award from the Charlotte Area Technology Collaborative. The Blue Diamond Awards are given annually to recognize technology innovation and talent in the Charlotte region.

Video Collaboratory is a web-based, private application designed for group collaboration around video documents. The program grew out of the Dance.Draw project, a three-year digital dance project funded by a CreativeIT grant from the National Science Foundation and created through a partnership between the Departments of Dance (Huskey) and Software and Information Technology (Latulipe and Wilson). An online software platform developed for Dance.Draw, which allowed dancers and choreographers to collaborate outside the rehearsal space by independently viewing and commenting on dance videos, eventually led to a software patent and the creation of Video Collaboratory, LLC.

The company, which is headquartered on the UNC Charlotte campus in PORTAL, has since received additional funding from the National Science Foundation.