Midwestern-born Case Sheppard (she/her) spent her childhood on wild adventures of imagination. As an adult, adventures became reality after moving to NYC, becoming a van-lifer, solo-cycling across Aotearoa, and going to college in her 40s.
Currently, Sheppard is a senior undergraduate student at Naropa University, a nontraditional, Buddhist-inspired, contemplative liberal arts institution that integrates rigorous academic study with contemplative and wisdom traditions. Sheppard maintains a 4.0 GPA while pursuing a major in Religious Studies and double minors in Environmental Studies and Performance.
Her academic work investigates the historical and contemporary forces that shape our cultural and social inequalities, with particular attention to the role of religious and anthropological whitewashing effects on current constructs of our social realities. Her research interests center on ritual studies of myth that embody the sacred feminine while exploring gender, menstruation, death, and the cultural, historical, religious, ancestral, and political meanings of blood and death. She is particularly interested in the connection between menstrual blood and death, how menstrual blood and death have been interpreted across religious traditions, how menstrual and death rituals have shaped lives throughout history, and how intersectional gender scholarship and performance practices can challenge stigma, reclaim embodied knowledge, and generate new understandings of self, the collective, and the sacred.
Combining her passion for the outdoors—whether on a mountain bike, paddleboard, or hiking trail—with a deep commitment to artistic expression, Sheppard creates performance art that investigates the complexities of contemporary life through embodied experience. Her work draws from personal experience, academic research, intuition, martial arts, current events, social justice movements, intersectional feminism, pop culture, ecology, and religious studies.
Through endurance performance, Sheppard embodies themes of felt complexity while experimenting with folklore, myth, and pop culture to create a unique and specific performance. Her artistic practice serves as a form of research and a method of inquiry, as well as expression. By engaging curiosities surrounding menstrual and death rituals, blood and death symbolism, Sheppard seeks to create work that questions the taboo, the historical, and the contemporary. Through this interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard aims to contribute to ongoing explorations within religious studies, performance studies, gender scholarship, anthropology, and ritual theory.
Her debut solo endurance performance art piece, Blood Witness, is the exploration of her senior thesis. Sheppard will continue her academic career by pursuing a master’s degree and/or a Ph.D. as she explores the history, myth, and power of blood & death.
