Zap McConnell began investigating dance/movement performance at North Carolina School of the Arts in 1988. Upon leaving NCSA, she began traveling, splitting her time between performance, visual arts and direct environmental activism in Northern California, New York City, Idaho, Mexico, Costa Rica and Colorado. Zap has been involved with the Zen Monkey Project since 1995 performing, teaching, stage managing, producing and directing evening-length pieces. She facilitated the New Dance Space and co-facilitated Studio 11 at the McGuffey Art Center, organized performance festivals and ZMP’s summer dance intensives. She is also a visual artist who regularly creates and prints cartoon books, paints, makes murals, sculpture and has built performance installation sets that also included lights and costumes. Zap has been a main organizer for many large scale community endeavors, spanning from a huge local artist created carnival, to an in-depth political community weekend investigating the past and present of Native Americans, to the adoption, with the stream ecology class, of a highly impaired stream for over ten years. Zap was a full time core teacher at the Living Education Center for Ecology and the Arts, an alternative high school in Charlottesville, Virginia, for almost a decade.Recently Zap has split her time between U.S.A. and Mexico and between performances, art shows and teaching. In 2008 Zap was commissioned by Performatica to make a site specific performance on the campus of UDLAP, working with students of dance and exploring the history of the land. This has sparked an enriching relationship between zap and the community of Cholula, Mexico that has continued with her core collaboration with Offrenda de Movento 2008/2009/2011(originally created, produced, directed by Denisse Cardenas), a community based performance event at the Jardin de Botanica to honor the heritage of Dia De los Muertos. She has also returned as a guest artist making more work with UPLAP students that has been performed at Performatica 2009/2011 and surrounding areas, and helped in other performances and community events. Upon returning to Virginia, in addition to 5 art shows in the last 3 years,  Zap has been part of Live Arts Dance Festival 2009 and created an evening length piece INVISIBLE SPINES, utilizing dancers from Puebla (produced by @hand productions, her newly created production company), to be premiered at the opening of  Dogtown Dance Theater, a brand new performance/community space created by Ground Zero Dance Company.  Zap also was involved with the spring 2010 tour of  Tevyn East’s one woman show: Leaps and Bounds, (an Affording Hope Project) while simultaneously finishing a giant wall mural painting project for Breakfast of Course, Winston-Salem, N.C.. 2011 found zap making another dance in mexico, being a dancer for Karl Frost’s Body of Knowledge in California and instigating/directing/producing the UNEARTHING, which will take most of her waking time until spring 2012 when she becomes the guest designer for Mad Women.