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Duke University Dance Program Course offerings (2018-present)

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Dance 561S: Art as Work: Valuing Labor in the Arts (description below)

Dance703S: Pedagogies of Dance 

Dance 462SL: Performance: Interdisciplinary

Dance 371SL: Artists in Healthcare: Collaborations and Complexities

Dance 787S/487S: Dance Research Methods

Dance 771S: Theories of Corporeality

Dance152: Improvisation

Dance 318S: Movement in Question: Introduction to Critical Dance Studies

Dance 101: Introduction to Dance

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Wesleyan University Course Offerings

Institute for Curatorial and Performance Practice (ICPP)

Visiting Assistant Professor

graduate program in performance curation 2018-2020​

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Entrepreneurial Strategies for Curatorial Practice (2018-2019, 2019-2020)

(co-taught with Dr. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez)

This graduate course for curators introduces students to a variety of creative strategies, practices, and resources that curators draw on to successfully build artistic projects from the idea phase through implementation, assessment, and next steps. To do this work, students will study a range of materials related to arts policy, entrepreneurship, and curatorial practice while also meeting with key artists and professionals. By the year’s end, students should be able to strategically build programming that leverages resources, but also addresses the needs of partners, audiences, and other key stakeholders.

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Brown University, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies and the Humanities

Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS)

2016-2018

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Movement and Gesture: Dance, Media, and Theory

This graduate seminar functions as a laboratory on writing the body and writing movement across the intra-disciplines of dance, media, and performance studies. In it, we will rehearse methods of writing bodies in/and movement, human and nonhuman, that have emerged in dance and performance scholarship over the past four decades. We will integrate literatures from political philosophy, economy, and phenomenology to show how writing movement and writing gesture performs across the humanities more broadly. Combining reading, writing, viewing, and practical explorations, students will reconsider habits of seeing and sensing the body in relationship to their own graduate projects.

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The Activist Body

What does it mean to be a politically responsive body in the current historical moment?

 

The current explosion of activist activity on and beyond college campuses has been called a “movement moment” (McCarthy, 2017), signaling an urgent need to address what it means to be a politically responsive body in the world today. This course examines activism as a topic and performance practice rooted in the body’s capacity to disrupt the political status quo. Building from the growing literature on protest and social movement in dance and performance studies, students will theorize activism and agentic embodiment, analyze cultural events that claim activist intentions, and body forth activist strategies and manifestos in weekly movement sessions. In class activities are multi-modal and include: responding to course readings, viewing and discussing activist case studies, observing and documenting activist repertoires in and beyond the Brown campus, and participation in movement sessions facilitated in class by the instructor and invited guests. Final research projects can take the form of academic papers, activist syllabi/curricula or staged interventions in the virtual or physical realm. To compliment these activities, students are required to attend the one-day Activist Body Symposium on Friday, September 29th, 2017 at the Granoff Center and Lyman Hall, a free arts and humanities convening that features twenty perspectives on political embodiment and social movement, broadly defined.

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Sweating Infrastructure: Cultures of Support in Dance and Performance

As the income gap in the US has grown, the possibility of a career in the performing arts has become increasingly less viable for a significant percentage of the population. Issues of arts funding, labor, and professionalization have been debated across academic disciplines and by arts organizers who experience these instabilities firsthand. Researching infrastructure through a dance studies lens, this course reframes the role of embodied action, interaction and assembly in sustaining enabling environments for the arts. By reviewing literature and interviewing arts professionals, this project evidences how people “sweat” the problem of sustaining art work differently on sociocultural grounds.

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Introduction to Dance Studies

This seminar casts students as a research team engaging with key contributions the interdisciplinary field of critical dance studies in a variety of ways. We read key literatures, view live and video archived performances, observe and ethnographically document movement “worlds” on and around the Brown University campus, and practically embody dance traditions and creative processes in the dance studio. This practical research is aimed at providing students with an experiential foray into choreographic analysis as a principal research methodology in dance studies in the US academy. One participatory aspect of this hybrid course is a “field work week,”  wherein students tour and ethnographically observe and document various non-dance movement “worlds” on around campus. Our goal is to extend dance methods to the study of non-danced behaviors and interactions. The course culminates in a Final Research Paper that links a student-selected movement “world” to key concepts introduced in the course. Student insights are presented orally in a mini-symposium at the end of term.

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University of California, Los Angeles (Teaching Assistant, Associate, Fellow)

Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance [http://www.wacd.ucla.edu/]

Visual and Performing Arts Education (VAPAE) Minor

September 2009 – June 2016

 

Global Perspectives on Dance, Dance Compositional Processes ,and Improvisation, and hybrid lecture/practice courses in critical dance pedagogy for upper division undergrads enrolled in UCLA's Visual and Performing Arts Education (VAPAE) Minor. In 2012-2013, I served as the departmental TA coordinator, facilitating graduate courses aimed at acclamating incoming students to departmental policies and the development of pedagogical tools and perspectives that align with their research areas and differentiated perspectives. I also served as a departmental teaching assistant in undergraduate courses in feminist film theory, and critical art pedagogy. I will outline the original coursework that I developed and implemented breifly, below.
 

In winter 2011, I wrote and implemented a critical dance pedagogy course for upper division undergraduates entitled, Art Education and Health: Movement-Based Pedagogy for Adult Populations for UCLA's Visual and Performing Arts Education program (UG minor). The course examined current projects involving artists and health care professionals with particular attention to issues of translation and critical methods, theories, and literacies required by these collaborations.I was a teaching artist in 2013 for the inaugural installation of the Classroom-in-Residence at the Hammer (CIR@H) project. CIR@H is designed to strengthen and advance student and teacher learning through a unique weeklong, immersive experience at the UCLA Hammer Museum with two (2) six grade classrooms from UCLA Community School. This project involves UCLA arts faculty, undergraduate pre-service arts educators, and classroom teachers invested in socially-engaged pedagogy. For a glimpse of the CIR@H program, see: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyEoBu6kezo]. In July/August 2013, I served as the dance teaching artist in residence with the Book Arts Summer Workshop,a pilot arts education and library literacy initiative led by VAPAE, the UCLA Lab School and the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, in the West Adams district.

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In Spring 2015, I wrote and implemented a campus wide lower division undergraduate seminar as a Collegium of University Teaching Fellow. The course, entitled: Infrastructure and the Performing Arts: Policies, Practices, Politics examined the historically unstable infrastructure of the performing arts through the transdisciplinary lens of performance studies. Integrates archival and practice-based research to highlight tensions between “official” policy narratives and the practical efforts of artists and arts intermediaries.

 

Other Academic Teaching Appointments (Non-Regular-Rank Faculty/Lecturer)

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1997-2007/28 semesters)

Marquette University (2003-2005/6 semesters)

Cal State University, Long Beach (2008-2014/5 semesters)

 

A full teaching vita is available upon request.

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