2012 - 2013 Board of Directors

Marta Elena Savigliano is a feminist political theorist, a librettist, and occasionally a performer interested in multi-art and international collaboration, cultural translation, and performance in globalization. Artists’ and scholars’ active participation in reproducing or challenging colonial world orders is consistently discussed in her work. She is the author of Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Westview, 1995), and Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North South Translation (Wesleyan U.P., 2003), including a tango opera. Her works have been translated into various languages, and widely presented at international academic fora. Savigliano’s current research focuses on staged and screened Global South responses to World Dance, in particular self-parodic versions of “traditional” dance forms associated to racialized, exotic, and erotic representations of “other” cultures and their contentious power in globalization. Savigliano is Professor Emerita of UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures department, and is currently professor of Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside’s Department of Dance, Director of the Body, Performance, and Dance Research Platform, and co-founder of GLOSAS (Global South Advanced Studies) located in Buenos Aires. 

Nadine George-Graves, PhD.
President-Elect

Anthony Shay, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies at Pomona College, Claremont, CA . He has been engaged as dancer, choreographer, and scholar in the field of dance for over 50 years. He has served on the CORD board for two terms, and has been a member of CORD almost since its inception. He is the author of Choreophobia: Solo Improvised Dance in the Iranian World, Choreographic Politics: State Folk Dance Companies, Representation and Power (for which he was awarded the CORD Outstanding Scholarly Publication for 2003), Choreographing Identities: Folk Dance, Ethnicity and Festival in the United States and Canada, andDancing Across Borders: The American Fascination with Exotic Dance Forms, as well as editing and co-editing three volumes: Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy (with Barbara Sellers-Young),Balkan Dance: Essays on Characteristics, Performance and Teaching, and When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders (with Jennifer Fisher). He has also published numerous articles. He is currently working on the Oxford Handbook on Dance and Ethnicity.

Libby Smigel, PhD.
Treasurer

Libby Smigel, Executive Director, Dance Heritage Coalition. After about three years as Project Director at the Coalition, Smigel stepped up as Executive Director in the summer of 2009.  Smigel has more than 15 years of teaching experience in dance and theatre departments in Toronto (York University), Upstate New York (Hobart and William Smith Colleges, RIT), and the metro DC area (University of Maryland, American University, George Washington University), where she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in dance history, criticism, and theory as well as choreographic methods and improvisation. With skills in digital video and web-design software, she has created online courses in addition to traditional seminar and lecture classes.  Her writings have been included in scholarly publications, encyclopedias, and newspapers, and she is currently working with a co-editor on a two-volume set titled Icons of American Dance (ABC-Clio to publish).  In addition to serving as CORD’s Treasurer, she also serves as associate editor for the Journal of American Culture and serves on the board of the joint Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.  Her academic training was completed at the University of Toronto Graduate Centre for Study of Drama (M.A., Ph.D), York University (M.F.A.), and Princeton University (A.B.).

Click here to view a list of Dr. Smigel's publications.

Hannah Kosstrin, PhD.
Treasurer-Elect

Hannah Kosstrin is Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Reed College, where she teaches courses in dance studies, Labanotation, and contemporary technique. Situated at the intersection of dance, Jewish, and gender studies, she researches questions of politics and identity in Anna Sokolow’s choreography. Hannah is currently directing a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities to make a mobile dance notation app. Her publications appear in Art Criticism and The International Journal of Screendance, with work forthcoming in Dance Research Journal and Investigating Dance on its Own Terms: Histories and Methodologies edited by Karen Eliot and Melanie Bales. Hannah also serves on the Dance Notation Bureau Professional Advisory Committee, and served SDHS as website content editor from 2005-2011. Hannah holds a Ph.D. in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University with a minor in women’s history. http://www.reed.edu/dance/faculty/kosstrin 

Maura Nguyen Donohue
Secretary

Maura Nguyen Donohue, MFA, is Assistant Professor of Dance at Hunter Collegein New York City .  She has taught workshops at schools across the country, served as visiting guest artist for Smith Collegeand as teaching fellow at Hampshire College, Mt. Holyoke College, and Smith College . She was born in Vietnam, raised in the USand is artistic director of NYC-based performance troupe Maura Nguyen Donohue/inmixedcompany.  In NY, she has been produced regularly at Dance Theater Workshop, as well as Performance Space 122, La Mama ETC, Danspace Project, Mulberry St. Theater, and The Kitchen.  Her work has toured the US, Canada, Europe andAsia.  She serves on the Board of Directors for Dance Theater Workshop and as Artistic Advisor for their Mekong Project she developed, curated, and facilitated several residency projects for artists in and from SE Asia and theUS .  She has written about dance and performance in the US and Asia for Dance Magazine, American Theater Journal, The Dance Insider, HK Dance Journal, New York State Danceforce and Critical Correspondence.  Her written research reflects her interests in representations of gender and race in contemporary dance, the burden of a tradition of rebellion in contemporary dance as built upon the history of the avant-garde, and the changing roles for dance artists in academia.

Helen Thomas, PhD.
Editorial Board Chair

Helen Thomas, Ph.D. is Research Director at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. Her first training was in dance at the Laban Art of Movement Studio. She taught dance for 7 years before embarking on first, a sociology degree and subsequently, a PhD, in which she set out to develop a rigorous methodological approach to the sociology of dance. Research interests centre on the sociology of dance and the body, modern dance and social dance forms, cultural theory, and qualitative research methods. Recent publications include: The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory (Palgrave 2003); Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory (eds. with J. Ahmed Blackwell 2004). She is currently completing a book, The Body and Everyday Life (for Routledge), and was Principal Investigator of a recently completed Arts and Humanities Research Council funded research project, Pain and Injury in a Cultural Context. www.danceinjuries.org

Takiyah Nur Amin, PhD.

Harmony Bench, PhD.
Director

Harmony Bench is Assistant Professor of Dance at The Ohio State University, where she teaches in the areas of Dance, Critical Theory, and Performance Studies. She completed her PhD in Culture and Performance at UCLA, and holds additional degrees in Performance Studies, Women’s Studies, and Ballet. Her current research focuses on mobile media, social media, and videogames as sites for choreographic inquiry and analysis, and their collective impact on movement, gesture, affect, and cultural belonging. Harmony’s writing can be found in Dance Research Journal, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and Participations as well as in a number of forthcoming edited collections. She is a founding member of the Centre for Screendance (http://screendance.wordpress.com/) and serves on the editorial board of The International Journal of Screendance (http://journals.library.wisc.edu/index.php/screendance). She is currently working on a book that addresses dance onscreen and the politics of mediality.  

Pallabi Chakravorty, PhD.
Director

Pallabi Chakravorty teaches Kathak dance and academic courses related to the anthropology of performance in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College.  Founder and artistic director of Courtyard Dancers, she is an anthropologist, dancer, choreographer, and cultural worker.  Pallabi’s academic research focuses on Indian dance, national identity, the anthropology of performance, processes of globalization, embodiment, gender, and the intersection of religion and performative practices.  She has published widely in scholarly journals such as Visual Anthropology, Dance Research Journal, South Asia, Dance Chronicle, Moving Worlds, and others.  She has co-edited two books and a Proceedings, “Performing Ecstasy: The Poetic and Politics of Religion in India” (Manohar Publishers), “Dance Matters” (Routledge), and “Dance in South Asia”.   She is the author of “Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women and Modernity in India” (Seagull/Macmillan/University of Chicago.  Her current research focuses on Indian dance and media with a focus on Bollywood dance and television reality shows.  Pallabi has received support for her work from India Foundation for the Arts, Dance Advance, Leeway foundation for the Arts and Asian Arts Initiative.  Her dance works (ranging from traditional repertoire to contemporary choreographies) explore the interdependence between art, life and labor.

Elizabeth Chin, PhD.
Director

Elizabeth Chin, PhD, is an ethnographer who has long worked in Haiti as well as in the US with a special interest in race and social inequality.  She is enmeshed in a large-scale project about Katherine Dunham that has several elements -- one element involves herself and a team of colleagues who examine Dunham's work and argue for her continuing importance to anthropology.  For Chin’s part she is interested in applying social actor network theory to an analysis of Dunham Technique, where the barre, the mirror, the floor and the dancer form a system constituting 'the dancer.'  Her approach to this work, and to her understanding of dance and dance scholarship is one that emphasizes its connection to larger social and political issues.  She is eager to see dance scholarship -- and CORD -- strategically demonstrate its relevance to how we (and others) understand and engage with cutting edge social theory, meaningful social action, and cultural change under circumstances where many attempt to argue that 'the arts' more generally have little relevance.

Clare Croft, PhD.
Director

Clare Croft is currently working on a book project focusing on US State Department sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. She uses oral history techniques, performance analysis, and archival research to explore individual dancers’ experiences on tours during the Cold War era and in the decade since 9/11. The project centers on interviews conducted with dancers who traveled on the tours. By seeing dancers as political and social agents, rather than only embodied tools for choreographers or government funders, the book examines dance and American national identity as collective practices forged from dancers’ diverse and complex identity positions.

Clare recently received her Ph.D. from the Performance as Public Practice program in the University of Texas-Austin’s Department of Theatre and Dance. Her academic writing on dance has been published in Theatre Journal and Theatre Topics. Clare’s Theatre Journal article, “Ballet Nations,” received the American Society of Theatre Research’s 2010 Sally Banes Publication Prize for the best publication at the intersection of dance and theatre studies. In 2007, Clare received the Society of Dance History Scholars Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for Outstanding Graduate Research for her paper, “Photographs and Dancing Bodies: Alvin Ailey’s 1967 US State Department Sponsored Tour of Africa.”  Clare is also an active dance dramaturg and dance critic. Her dance writing has been published in The Washington Post, the Austin American Statesman, Dance Magazine, The Baltimore Sun, and the Houston Chronicle, among other newspapers and magazines. In 2003, Clare received the Emerging Dance Writer of the Year award from the Dance Critics Association. Clare comes to dance scholarship and dance writing from a background as a dancer. She worked as a dancer in Washington, DC, primarily with Crossroads Dance Company.

Anne Flynn, MA is Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Calgary, with a joint appointment in the Faculties of Arts and Kinesiology.   Her research on Canadian women in dance, multiculturalism and identity, and dance in health promotion and education has been presented and published internationally and supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.  She and Lisa Doolittle have been research collaborators for twenty-five years beginning with the founding of Dance Connection magazine, and she has served on the boards of local, provincial and national dance organizations.  Since 2005 she has been manager of Urban Dance Connect, a community/university dance project.  Flynn holds degrees from SUNY Brockport and Wesleyan University where she was fortunate to study under Richard Bull, Susan Foster and Cynthia Novack.

Sherril Dodds is Professor and Chair of the Dance Department at Temple University, US. Prior to taking up this post in Fall 2011, she was Head of the Department of Dance, Film and Theatre, and Director of Postgraduate Research at the University of Surrey, UK. She is a founder member of the UK PoPMOVES research group and initiated the SDHS Popular, Social and Vernacular Dance Working Group. In 2008 and 2009, she was an Erasmus Visiting Lecturer at Trondheim University in Norway and in 2010 she was a Visiting Academic at the Centre for Cultural Research at Griffith University in Australia. She has published two monographs, Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art (Palgrave, 2001) and Dancing on the Canon: Embodiments of Value in Popular Dance (Palgrave, 2011), and has co-edited an anthology, Bodies of Sound (Ashgate, forthcoming) with Professor Susan Cook.

Judith Hamera's scholarship is interdisciplinary, contributing to American, communication, and cultural studies, as well as performance and dance studies.  Her research examines the social work of aesthetics, especially play with genre conventions for self-fashioning and community building on and off stage.  Her latest book, Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Lives of the American Home Aquarium, 1870-1970, is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. She is the co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing (2009) with Alfred Bendixen, and the author of Dancing Communities: Performance, Difference and Connection in the Global City (Studies in International Performance: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which received the Book of the Year award from the National Communication Association's Ethnography Division.  Other books are Opening Acts: Performance In/As Communication and Cultural Studies (Sage, 2006); and the Sage Handbook of Performance Studies, co-edited with D. Soyini Madison (2006).

Her essays have appeared in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Cultural Studies, TDR: The Drama Review, Modern Drama, Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Topics, and Women and Language. She is the recipient of the National Communication Association's Lilla Heston Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Performance Studies; has served as editor of Text and Performance Quarterly, the performance studies journal of the National Communication Association; and is a member of the Congress on Research in Dance Board of Directors.  Before coming to Texas A&M in 2005, Dr. Hamera taught at California State University, Los Angeles, where she held numerous administrative appointments and was honored as both a university Outstanding Professor and President's Distinguished Professor.  She received her BA in Mass Communication from Wayne State University and her MA and PhD in Interpretation and Performance Studies, respectively, from Northwestern University.