For many years a modern dancer and choreographer, Judith Rock founded Body and Soul Dance Company in Berkeley, California, toured extensively as a solo concert dancer, and studied baroque dance. Research for her Ph.D. in art and theology took her to Paris, where she lived at the nearby Jesuit Cultural Center and researched the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ballets produced at the Paris Jesuit College of Louis le Grand.

In a startling leap, Rock then spent several years as a police officer before taking that experience back to the stage as a playwright and actress. She was an auxiliary officer in the NYPD, and later a part-time police officer in Minnesota, working midnight shifts.

Rock has written on dance, art, and theology for many journals, and has been artist-in-residence and taught and lectured at colleges, seminaries and conferences across the United States and abroad. The Rhetoric of Death, her first novel, was a 2011 Barry Award nominee. Less