DENTON, Texas (UNT) – Composer/musician Claudia Howard Queen of the University of North Texas will give American insights for music-dance collaboration when she travels to Taipei, Taiwan, in November as part of her third Fulbright Specialist award.

Queen, associate professor of music for dance at UNT, will teach dancers how to work effectively with a musician in an improvisational dance concert setting. She also will perform with members of Ku & Dancers, Taiwan's most noted improvisational dance company, as part of iDance Taipei 2015.

The Fulbright Specialist program, which complements the Fulbright Scholar Program, allows faculty members and professionals to attend academic opportunities around the world for two-to-six weeks.

In her previous residences, she visited the Taipei National University of the Arts, the country's foremost arts school, where she provided original music for dance classes, gave workshops on musicality for dancers, taught music composition for choreography and led lecture demonstrations.

"During my first visit to Taiwan, I wondered what I had to offer these highly competent artists and educators," she said. "I realized that though the students could be creative, in the past, creativity had not generally been stressed in their culture. So I was able to offer the Taiwanese students more space, opportunities and methods to fully express the creativity as dancers and musicians that was already there."

Queen has been part of UNT's Department of Dance and Theatre since fall 2008. Her music has been performed across the United States, England, Ireland, China, Taiwan and Uruguay. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and was an UNT Institute for the Advancement of the Arts fellow in 2013-14.

She is looking forward to visiting Taiwan again.

"The Fulbright has been a life changing opportunity for me," she said. "On my first visit to Taiwan, I knew nothing of Taiwanese culture, and have learned so much about different ways of thinking and approaches to art and life. It is my goal to share all these ideas with my students in the U.S., and hopefully inspire them to have a curiosity and respect for other cultures, and to be open to and appreciative of international ideas and different ways of thinking."