Debra Hickenlooper Sowell is a dance historian and professor of humanities and theater history at Southern Virginia University.
Her 580-page tome devoted to The Christensen Brothers: An American Dance Epic (Harwood, 1998) garnered two awards: the 1998 Evans Handcart Award for western biography and the 1999 De la Torre Bueno Prize's Special Citation from the Dance Perspectives Foundation.
They have also assembled perhaps the largest private collection of pre-20th-century rare dance prints and books in the United States.
Together with curator Paul L. Anderson, they produced the exhibit "Splendor and Spectacle: Images of Dance from Court Ballet to Broadway" (July–December 2007) for the BYU Museum of Art.
The exhibit was based solely on materials in the Sowell Collection, as were the illustrations for their book on Il balletto romantico (Palermo: L'Epos, 2007).