Angie Ahlgren is a second-year Ph.D. student in Performance as Public Practice, and holds an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Minnesota. She is interested in the politics of “multicultural” performance, Asian American literature and performance, and queer studies. She presented “Watching With ‘Unholy Fascination’: Derek Jarman's Edward II, Its Critics, and Its Queer Moment” at the 2005 British Graduate Shakespeare Conference, and is developing a scholarly piece on race and gender in North American taiko drumming. She is a member of Mu Daiko, a professional taiko ensemble in Minneapolis, where she has performed and taught for the last nine years.

Elizabeth Aldrich was named dance curator of the Music Division, Library of Congress, in 2006, after having served as executive director of the Dance Heritage Coalition. She is internationally known for her work in period dance, and she has provided choreography for nine feature films, including The Age of Innocence, The Remains of the Day, Washington Square, and The Haunted Mansion. Aldrich is the author of “Documentation, Preservation, and Access: Ensuring a Future for Dance’s Legacy,” in Teaching Dance Studies (2005); From the Ballroom to Hell: Grace and Folly in Nineteenth-Century Dance (1991); “Introduction,” International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998); among other works.

Valerie Alpert Chicago performing artist and dance faculty member at the College of Lake County, discusses how emerging technologies open future connections between and influences the shape of dance scholarship, performance, and pedagogy. Issues of accessibility, visual reading, and interactive formats will be included.

Takiyah Nur Amin holds degrees from the State University of New York at Buffalo and Virginia Tech. Currently she is a third year student in the doctoral program in dance and cultural studies at Temple University. Additoinally, Takiyah is pursuing a certificate in women's studies and additional coursework in Arabic. Miss Amin is proud to be a Future Faculty Fellow and Graduate Associate of the Center for the Humanities (CHAT) at Temple.

Meredith Ashton is a senior dance student in the Modern Dance department at Utah Valley University. She will complete her BFA in April 2009 with Honors and pursue further study in graduate school. This summer her dance studies propelled her to Beijing where she was able to continue her research looking at dance in China in connection with the 2008 Olympic Games. As a native of Utah Valley, Meredith finds joy in the process of learning and looks forward to the adventure ahead.

Ojeya Cruz Banks (Ph.D) is a dancer, choreographer and dance anthropologist whose research interests include dance pedagogy, the postcolonial dance context and contemporary fusion technique, and choreography. She has studied dance in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Mali, Guinea and Cuba. Her influential teachers include renowned dancers such as Katherine Dunham, Ron Brown, Moustapha Bangoura and Eno Washington. She has taught at the University of Arizona, the University of Michigan, and she worked as visiting scholar at the University of Makerere in Uganda. Her dance work as been commissioned by Michigan State University, Eastern Michigan University, the ZUZI dance company, the People Dancing Company, Makerere University. She works as a lecturer of Dance Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

Ramie Becker is a doctoral candidate in Dance History and Theory at UC Riverside, Ramie is fervently finishing “Body/Space/Music: The Politics of Dance Club Culture in 21st Century Los Angeles,” investigating places where people go to dance to electronic music in Los Angeles. Fusing theories of music, spatiality and corporeality, Ramie explores how personal and collective politics figure into the technologies of social dance spaces, or ‘discotechnes’. She is the founder/organizer of the dance collective RAID, Random Acts of Irreverent Dance, which performs regularly in the LA area. She also writes weekly articles for Los Angeles Citybeat, covering music, theater, and dance events.

Harmony Bench is a doctoral candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA where she is currently finishing her dissertation on dance, interactivity, and the Internet. She is particularly interested in how new media demand a rigorous re-consideration of choreography as a concept and how, as images, dancing bodies articulate new dance practices on/for the screen. As both dancer and scholar, Harmony divides her time between performing, writing, and teaching. She also holds degrees in Performance Studies from NYU and in Women’s Studies and Ballet from the University of Utah.

Susan Bendix is a dancer and choreographer who has done movement work in contexts ranging from corporate to inner city and incarcerated youth to refugees. She is a doctoral candidate focusing her research on creativity and learning.

Laura Blakely graduated from the University of Utah with her MFA in Modern Dance in May 2008. As an undergraduate, Laura studied Philosophy of Religion and English at Bowdoin College, graduating with her BA in 2001. During graduate school, Laura performed in the works of faculty members, Eric Handman, Pamela Geber, Steve Koester, Abby Fiat, Brent Schneider and Satu Hummasti. Her graduate research focused on history and how it translates through the body. Currently, Laura lives in Salt Lake City and plans to move to the Bay Area to pursue movement, writing and choreography this winter.

Alison Bory received her MFA in Experimental Choreography (2006) and her PhD in Dance History and Theory (2008) from the Dance Department at University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation, “Dancing With My Self: Performing Autobiography in (Post)Modern Dance,” examines contemporary modern dance choreographies of personal narratives as sites of performative self-making. She is currently choreographing new work and teaching in the Los Angeles area.

Jessica Briggs received her B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Minnesota in May 2008. As a new choreographer to the Minneapolis/St. Paul community, Jessica investigates art as activism, using dance as a means of protest and social change. Jessica has recently joined Paula Mann's Time Track Productions and has joined Ananya Dance Theatre as their program manager. Jessica is honored to be a part of the CORD conference and will continue to deconstruct, question, and write about the body in a way that is both poetic and critical.

Meg Brooker is an MFA Candidate in Performance as Public Practice at UT Austin. She specializes in early modern dance research, particularly the work of Isadora Duncan and Florence Fleming Noyes. With her thesis, she seeks to historicize the Noyes Rhythm technique as a danced somatic practice. Meg has performed and taught Duncan repertory as a member of Lori Belilove & Company and is an apprentice
teacher of Noyes Rhythm. Meg was a 2007 recipient of a student travel grant to attend the SDHS conference with CORD in Paris. She earned her BA in theatre studies cum laude from Yale University.

Maija Brown has a BA in Sociology/Anthropology & Dance Studies, an MA in Theater History and is PhD candidate in Theater & Dance History. She also teaches courses in the Department of Dance. This is her first year working at the writing center and she is very enthusiastic to be here. She is most familiar with working with arts and humanities papers, but welcomes papers from any field. She is most comfortable with MLA style. When not working she has endless amounts of fun playing with her dogs Chang-gu and Tokki.

Catherine Cabeen is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Washington. She was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company from 1998 - 2005. Cabeen has also been a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, Pearl Lang Dance Theater, Richard Move’s MoveOpolis! and his Martha@... series. Cabeen’s choreography has been commissioned by the 92nd St. Y, Aaron Davis Hall, American College Dance Festival NW, and On the Board’s Northwest New Works Festival. Catherine is responsible for the 2007-08 restagings of D-Man in The Waters for BTJ/AZ at SUNY Purchase and the University of Illinois.

Tanya Calamoneri is a PhD student in Dance and Presidential Fellow at Temple University. She received her MA from NYU’s Gallatin School, focusing on Butoh, and BA from American University in International Relations. She has published two reviews of Butoh-related books in Dance Chronicle and an interview with Dairakurakan’s Muramatsu Takuya in Movement Research Journal. Tanya was a Founding Faculty Member of Experimental Performance Institute at New College and Executive Director of Dancers’ Group, both in San Francisco, and Co-Director of The Field in New York City. She is the Artistic Director of award-winning Company SoGoNo in New York City.

Linda Caldwell, faculty member in the low-residential doctoral program at Texas Woman’s University, introduces the topic in terms of information retrieval, standards within shifting scholarly practices, and alternative formats for theses and dissertations currently practiced within various disciplines.

Rosemary Candelario is a scholar, dancer, and activist in the Culture and Performance Ph.D. program at UCLA, where she earned a M.A. with a concentration in dance in 2007. Her current research focuses on the embodied practice and choreography of JapaneseúAmerican dancers, Eiko & Koma.

Peter Carpenter is a choreographer and scholar interested in cultivating the tacit relationship between the dancing body and the body politic. Based in Chicago, his dances have garnered critical acclaim for their innovative structural devices, queer theatricality, and formal investigation. He received his MFA in Dance from UCLA (2003) and is currently ABD in the Culture and Performance Studies program where he is writing about gay dancing cowboys in ethnographic and concert stage contexts. He has been a tenure-track faculty member at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago since 2005.

Pallabi Chakravorty, a visual anthropologist and Kathak exponent, is the founder and artistic director of the contemporary dance ensemble the “Courtyard Dancers”, in Philadelphia. Pallabi’s scholarly and choreographic works reflect her long immersion in classical Indian dance, ethnographic methods, and social theory. Her inter disciplinary scholarly work has been published in many journals such as: South Asia, Dance Research Journal, Visual Anthropolgy. Her first book: “Bells of Change: Kathak Dance, Women, and Modernity in India” was just launched in India. Other edited books forthcoming are “Performing Ecstasy: The Poetics and Politics of Religion in India”, with Scott Kugle, and “Dance Matters” with Nilanjana Gupta. She is a faculty member in the department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College, and will be serving as acting director for Dance for the 2008 academic year.

Ying-Chu Chen recently received her doctorate in dance from Temple University. She also holds M.A. degrees in dance and media studies. She has been researching the worldwide development of ballet, particularly in Asia. Her dissertation explores the survival of the Taiwanese ballet within local, as well as global, cultural contexts. While continuing her research as a ballet historian, she is expanding her scholarly interests to include technology’s influence on the creative process and the viewing experience of dance. Ying-Chu is currently a freelance dance author and writes grant proposals for performing arts organizations.

Mary Edsall Choquette is an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science at The Catholic University of America. She is Past-President of CORD and Founding Curator of the Philadelphia Dance Collection. Choquette serves as Editor of A Core Collection in Dance, for which she was awarded the 2002 Lillian Moore Award by the Dance Perspectives Foundation. She has published in Dance Research Journal and American National Biography, and her current research is in the area of cultural heritage information management, and in the area of oral history, memory, and biography.

Clare Croft is a Ph.d. Candidate in the Performance as Public Practice program in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas-Austin, where she is writing a dissertation focused on U.S. State Department sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy. Clare has published performance and book reviews in Theatre Journal and Dance Research Journal, and her article on dance dramaturgy within the undergraduate dance curriculum will appear in Theatre Topics this spring. In 2007 Clare received the Society of Dance History Scholars’ Selma Jeanne Cohen Award for outstanding graduate student work.

Dominique O. Cyrille, is the Director of Research at the Center For Traditional Music and Dance (CMDT) of Guadeloupe in the French Caribbean and an Assistant Professor of African and African-American Studies at Lehman College (CUNY) where she teaches Caribbean history and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Universite Paris-IV-Sorbonne, Paris, France. She has researched and published extensively on the music and dance traditions of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and other Creole-speaking countries of the Caribbean.

Jessica Damon is a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Primarily a modern dancer and choreographer, she spent several years involved with the Brazilian dance community of Santa Cruz, California, where she became fascinated with Brazilian cultural forms. This paper represents her investigation into the problems and implications of being a “Brazilian dancer” in the United States. Jessica has danced professionally with Mel Wong, Anne Bluethenthal, Huckabay McAllister, RAWdance, and Dance Brazil. She will graduate in the Spring of ’09 with an MFA in Choreography and Performance and emphases in Somatic Studies and Dance for the Camera.

Marilynn Danitz is the Artistic Director of High Frequency Wavelength and recent President of the American Dance Guild. She has received the Jacob's Pillow Artist Residency, Dance Brew’s Outstanding Dance Theatre Work of the Year, Choreography Award of Distinction, and Reel Art Ways National Residency. Her presentations have been featured in Japan, Australia, Italy, China, Taiwan, Korea, Bulgaria, Colombia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Russia, Belarus, the Philippines, Canada, and 14 international festivals in New York. She has been Broadcast on CBS, ABC, and in 9 countries. Marilynn has had collaborations with poet-laureate, Allen Ginsber; photographer, Jerry Uelsmann; and composer Jesu Pinzon. She was an invited guest speaker at an international press-conference with Mikhail. Marilynn was also commissioned for choreography by Nukri Magalashvili of the Bolshoi Ballet, the Prima Ballerina of the National Ballet of Colombia.

Della Davidson is a Professor at UC Davis in the Department of Theater and Dance as well as Artistic Director of Sideshow Physical Theater, the resident professional company of the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Sideshow is devoted to the development of new, interdisciplinary performance work. Previously Davidson was the Artistic Director of the Della Davidson Dance Theater for over 20 years, and is the creator of some 40 choreographic and theatrical works.

Andrea Deagon received her Ph.D. in Classical studies from Duke University in 1984, and she currently coordinates the Classical Studies program at UNC-Wilmington, as well as teaching in the Women's Studies porgram. Since 1975 she has studied, taught and performed Middle Eastern dance. Her articles on dance history and interpretation have appeared in various dance and academic publications.

Kent De Spain is a dance and multi-disciplinary artist who holds a doctorate in Dance Studies from Temple University. He has taught and toured throughout the United States, Europe and the UK. He has presented his research at numerous international conferences and symposia, and is particularly known for his critical analysis of trends in dance research, and for his lectures, workshops, and writings on improvisational process (look for his upcoming book on improvisation from Wesleyan University Press).

Deepa Dharmadhikari grew up in New Delhi, India, and is currently attending the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, in Minneapolis, USA.

Kristine Diekman is a renowned video artist who has received numerous grants and fellowships. Committed to making socially integrated work while exploring issues on a personal level, Kristine’s work addresses institutionalization, language, sanity, somatic experience, and feminist identity through documentary, narrative, and poetic strategies. She is Professor of Video at California State University, San Marcos, where she developed the Community Video Project and serves on the Board of Directors of Media Arts Center, San Diego.

Ann Dils is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is Editor of Dance Research Journal (2006-2008) and co-edited the collections Intersections: Dance, Place, and Identity (2006) and Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (2001). Dils is co-director of Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy, an initiative to develop humanities-based teaching materials in dance.

Kadidia Viviane Doumbia was born in Paris (France) in 1961. She obtained the Medal of Honor at the World Dance Training in Paris in 1979. She studied with Maida Withers and Nancy Johnson at the George Washington University Dance department in Washington DC, and graduated in 1985 from Regents College (now Excelsior College) in Albany with a BS degree. Back in the Ivory Coast (West Africa), Ms. Doumbia opened a dance school and also contributed to the organization of the Dance department of the National Institute of Arts in the city capital of Abidjan. She worked and studied with Lori Belilove of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation in New York city, and she founded the SAKOLOLAI Dance Company. She is trained in Baroque Dance and the Feuillet Movement Notation System, and she is also received training in the Benesh Movement Notation System at the Royal Academy of Dance in London, England. Ms. Doumbia worked as the choreographer of the National Ballet of Mali for two years ( 2004-2006) and gave a dance workshop at the new Conservatory of Arts in Bamako in 2006 ( Mali). She moved her dance Company from Abidjan in the Ivory Coast to Bamako in Mali and participated to several dance festivals such as the “Festival Dense Bamako Danse 2006”. Ms. Doumbia is a member of the International Dance Council CID-UNESCO and member of the Executive Committee of the CID and is currently working on a Master Degree program in Education and on the Labanotation certification.

Barbara Drazin MA, Dance Heritage Coalition executive director, served as curator of the H.L. Mencken House in Baltimore and as museum program officer at the Institute of Museum Services (now the Institute of Museum and Library Services) among other positions before joining the DHC in 2002. She has also held positions as interim school director and education assistant for the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and as education coordinator and registrar at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. Working with co-curators Lynn Garafola and Norton Owen, she coordinated preparations (including copyright clearances) and traveling arrangements for the DHC traveling exhibition “America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures.”

Kristi Faulkner currently attends The College at Brockport where she is earning her MFA in Dance Choreography and Performance. She graduated from Bowling Green State University where she obtained her B.S. in Dance Performance and B.A.C. in Theatre: Acting/Directing. While at BGSU, she performed as a member of the University Performing Dancers, in addition to her appearances in productions with the Dance Program, the Department of Theatre and Film, and the College of Musical Arts. Kristi enjoys working with film and multimedia as well as spoken and sung text in her work to explore issues of identity, human rights, and the political environment. Kristi recently taught at Trollwood Performing Arts School in Fargo, ND – an outdoor summer arts program affiliated with the Fargo Public School District that draws upon nature as a source of creative inspiration. She is also an active member of The College at Brockport's student chapter of the National Dance Education Association, serving as the chapter’s co-chair. Ms. Faulkner's creative interest in identity, human rights, and the political environment finds alternate avenues of expression through her work as a Women's Center Ambassador at The College at Brockport.

Anne Fiskvik holds a position at the Department of Musicology, Program for Dance-Studies at the University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. Alongside her career as a dancer and choreographer, her main research areas are the relationship between theatre dance and music, and the history of Norwegian theatre dance.

Susan Leigh Foster, choreographer and scholar, is Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. She is currently working on the problematics of choreography, kinesthesia, and empathy.

Dr. Cindy García is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where she is also an affiliate faculty member in Chicano Studies. Her research interests include the performance of Latina/o-ness in urban libidinal economies and practices of racialization in the United
States. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Un/Sequined
Corporealities and the Deterritorialization of Salsa that addresses the
politics of gendered performances of Mexican-ness, Latinidad, and belonging in Los Angeles salsa clubs.

Cara Gargano is Chair of the Department of Film and Dance and Theatre and Professor of Dance and Theatre at the CW Post Campus of Long Island University. She has published in both English and French in Modern Drama, Reliologiques, Dance Research Journal, Theatre Research International, and New Theatre Quarterly. She has provided chapters for several books including Mythes dans la littérature contemporaine d’expression française, Réécritures des mythes: utopie au feminine, Réécritures de Madeleine Monette, Anne-Marie Alonzo: Collection d’essais, and most recently, Hermes-Aphrodite Encounters. She is a Past President of the Congress on Research in Dance, and serves as a choreography peer reviewer for the National Dance Association Promotion and Tenure Initiative.

Victoria Phillips Geduld performed with the Wendy Hilton Dance Company and Anna Sokolow. She is a Ph.D. candidate in twentieth-century cultural and political history at Columbia University where she received her B.A., followed by an MBA in Finance. She holds two Master's degrees from New York University. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Grant's Interest Rate Observer, Ethel Winter and her Choreography, American Communist History, and in an upcoming issue of Ballet Review. The Centre National de la Dance published her exhibition catalogue, Dance is a Weapon.

Shelly Gilbride is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at UC Davis completing her dissertation on the legacy of Merce Cunningham. In addition to performing in many regional theatre and summer stock productions, she has worked in the Development departments of various arts organizations including the Painted Bride Arts Center in
Philadelphia and American Dance Festival and HERE Arts Center in New York
City.

Tanji Gilliam is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received an MFA in Film, Video and New Media. She is a doctoral student in the History of Culture Department at The University of Chicago. Her multi- media archive/dissertation project is entitled "that crack in the concrete: hip- hop, politics and the archive in black urban video culture, 1989-2004." She is a teacher in the Museum Studies Department and Video Studio Director at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, a wife and mother of two sons and Artistic Director of Oil House Productions.

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (2005); Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts (1996) and Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (2002). She is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University. She is a senior consultant/writer for Dance Magazine and performs with her husband, choreographer Hellmut Gottschild.

Tomie Hahn (Ph.D. Wesleyan University, 1996) Associate Professor at Rensselaer, is an ethnomusicologist and dance scholar. Tomie’s activities span a wide range of topics including: Japanese traditional performing arts, Monster Truck rallies, issues of identity and creative expression of multiracial individuals, and relationships of technology and culture; interactive dance/movement performance; and gestural control and extended human/computer interface in the performing arts. Hovering above these topics is her fascination with the body and transmission, the primary focus of her recent book Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance (Wesleyan University Press). http://www.arts.rpi.edu/tomie/

Thomas Hecht faculty member at the University of the Arts London, the Palucca School in Dresden, and the University of Bern in Switzerland, discusses how the integration of media (audio formats and videos) into the presentation of his research (Emotionally Intelligent Ballet Training) can directly reach a broad and diverse audience.

Michelle Heffner Hayes, a dancer, choreographer and dance scholar, holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from UC-Riverside. Following more than a decade as a curator and director of organizations devoted to multidisciplinary performance and the commissioning of new work, she joined the faculty of the University of Kansas in 2006, where she teaches modern dance, improvisation, dance history and flamenco. Her forthcoming book Flamenco Histories: Exoticism and the Dancing Body, will be published by McFarland & Company in 2009.

Jessica Ray Herzogenrath is an MA candidate in American Dance Studies at Florida State University. She holds a BA in History from Northwestern University with an emphasis in American studies. Her thesis research explores the synthesis of African and European aesthetics in early twentieth century American vernacular performance. She continues to perform, choreograph and teach in both jazz and contemporary idioms.

Constance Valis Hill is a jazz dancer, choreographer, and dance scholar whose articles have appeared in Dance Magazine, Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, and Studies in Dance History; and in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African-American Dance (2001) and Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (2008). Her book, Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000) received the Deems Taylor ASCAP Award. She received a 2006 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and 2007 Rockefeller research fellowship to write a twentieth-century cultural history of tap dance in America. She is a Five College Professor of Dance Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Ana Paula Höfling is in her third year as a Ph.D. student in Culture and Performance at UCLA. She has been involved with capoeira for the past 16 years, and has been a student of capoeira angola with Mestre Jogo de Dentro since 2005. She has been writing about capoeira for the past three years, and has presented her work at national and international conferences. She holds an MA in Dance from UCLA and an MFA in Dance from the University of Hawai`i.

Carla Huntington (PhD Dance History and Theory, UC Riverside, Riverside California; MBA Marketing, California State University, San Bernardino, San Bernardino, California; and BA Economics, UC Riverside) is an associate professor of Marketing at Missouri Southern State University. Her current research stream focuses on dance and consumer behavior.

Naomi Jackson is Associate Professor at Herberger College Dance at Arizona State University. Her work on dance, human rights, and ethics, has culminated in various projects, presentations and publications: Between 2002-2004 she oversaw a study on the use of dance and movement as a healing modality with women refugees in Phoenix; in 2004 she edited Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights (Banff Centre Press); in 2005 she organized the first international CORD conference on Dance and Human Rights (Montreal); and forthcoming, from Scarecrow Press, is the edited collection (with Toni Shapiro-Phim) Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion.

Hwan Jung Jae is currently a PhD student at Temple University and received the doctor of philosophy scholarly achievement award in 2006. Ms.Jae has had five books published in Korea such as Choi Seung-Hee, An Elusive Muse of Chosun (2005) and Mr. Layman Goes to a Dance Performance (2004). She holds the MA and the BA in Dance from Ewha Womans University.

Jodi James was an Assistant Research Professor in Dance and Computation with the Arts, Media and Engineering Program at Arizona State University for the past five years. She also holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Dance, Engineering and Kinesiology.

Peter Jaszi JD, is faculty director of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and professor of law at the Washington College of Law, American University. He holds expertise in intellectual property and copyright law. Jaszi advised and facilitated the successful “fair use” project for documentary filmmakers in 2005, and he recently completed a report on best practices in “fair use” for online video. He was editor of The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature (with M. Woodmansee, Duke UP, 1994). He is co-author of Legal Issues in Addict Diversion (Lexington Books, 1976) and Copyright Law, 3d ed. (Matthew Bender, 1994), among other works.

Ok Hee Jeong is currently a Ph.D. student and Presidential Fellow at Temple University. As a former dancer with the Universal Ballet Company in Korea and the Guangzhou City
Ballet in China, she received the Honor Scholarship and the Graduate Research Fellowship as she pursued her B.A. and M.A. in Dance from Ewha Womans University in Korea. Jeong has received Research Excellence Award from the Korean Society for
Dance Studies in 2007, and Scholarly Achievement Award from Temple University in 2008.

Lela Aisha Jones discusses the advancement of community through socio-arts collaborations. She facilitated collaborative projects with Pinelands Creative Workshop Barbados, and L’Ecole Des Sables Senegal. She has performed with Urban Bush Women, Black Smiths Daughter Dance Theatre/Nia Love and INSPIRIT/Christal Brown.

Ketu H. Katrak, born in Bombay, India, is Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). Founding Chair of UCI’s Department of Asian American Studies (2002). Author of Politics of the Female Body: Postcolonial Women Writers from the Third World (Rutgers University Press, 2006); “Body Boundarylands: Ethnicity in Performance and in Daily Life”, in Amerasia Journal (2001); “Cultural Translation of Bharatanatyam and Contemporary Indian Dance” in South Asian Popular Culture (2004). Recipient of Fulbright Research Award to India (2005-06) for current project on bharatanatyam and Contemporary Indian Dance.

Aparna Keshaviah is a professional Bharatanatyam dancer and biostatistician. With a Master’s degree in biostatistics from the Harvard School of Public Health and over 25 years of experience in south Indian dance, Keshaviah performs, teaches, and researches in a hybrid format. Each project integrates artistic exploration with scientific rigor. Her performances strip Bharatanatyam to core elements of rhythm and geometry, probing cultural mediation and forms of expression. Her research investigates Bharatanatyam’s diversity, extension, and evolution. Keshaviah’s understanding and teaching of classical and contemporary Indian dance is enhanced by training in yoga, classical piano, and voice.

Vivia Kieswetter is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at York University in Toronto Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida and a Master of Music from The University of Toledo in Toledo, Ohio. Her research deals with the body as instrument in both vocal and dance performance in the Christian church, and how performance is transformed into worship in this context.

Jayne King directs the dance program at Northwest Vista College in San Antonio. She is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, where she was Artistic Director of Janlyn Dance Company, creating over twenty original works for the ensemble from 1997-2004. Since moving to San Antonio Jayne has especially enjoyed making dances with the San Antonio Modern Dancers Co-Lab, which she co-founded in 2005. She has a Masters degree from Mills College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin. Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner. Other recent choreographic projects include Restraint System, a site specific work for the Blue Star Contemporary Arts Gallery in San Antonio and Floodgate, a dance film shot on location at the Flood Control Tunnel Outlet Building on the San Antonio River. In Spring 08 Jayne directed Performing History: Discovering Reciprocal Influences in Contemporary Dance(Mexico and the United States), a reconstruction of Anna Sokolow’s Frida and international exchange with the Escuela Nacional de Danza in Mexico City, sponsored by the American Masterpieces program of the NEA.

Natalie King is co-founder of Dance Education Solutions, an online company which combines professional dance research and educational expertise with digital media in order to create affordable, dynamic solutions for the advancement of dance education. Ms. King earned her master's degree in fine arts from Arizona State University, and is certified for dance education K-12 and elementary education Nk-6. She currently teaches dance at Camelback High School and performs with Flux Dance in Phoenix, Arizona.

Michelle Kisliuk (Ph.D. New York University, 1991), teaches performance theory, ethnographic writing, music in everyday life, and directs the African Music and Dance Ensemble at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (Oxford University Press), as well as essays in Shadows in the Field (Oxford University Press), and Performing Ethnomusicology (University of California Press), among others. By way of personalizing and particularizing aesthetic processes, her work challenges the divide between performance and scholarship, and engages with postcolonial politics; issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and identity formations.

Kelly Knox is an Assistant Professor at Bucknell University. She received an M.F.A. in dance from the University of Washington and a B.F.A. from the North Carolina School of the Arts. Kelly taught at Mimar Sinan State Conservatory in Istanbul, Turkey from 1999-2001. She has danced professionally in New York, San Francisco and Istanbul.

Alexandra Kolb is the Chair of the Dance Studies programme at Otago University in New Zealand, having received her doctorate from Cambridge. She trained professionally in dance in Düsseldorf and at John Neumeier’s Academy of the Hamburg Ballet. Her research interests include European dance and literature in twentieth century modernism; dance, politics, and globalisation. She has contributed to several international journals, and her book on Performing Femininity (Oxford) will be published in 2008.

Hari Krishnan, World Dance Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Dance at Wesleyan University and Artistic Director of inDANCE of Toronto, discusses the documentation, translation, and analysis of the last hereditary systems of dance in South India through an integration of performance studies, history, and gender studies.

SanSan Kwan (Ph.D, NYU) is an assistant professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at Cal State Los Angeles. Her research focuses on Asian/Asian American contemporary dance and urban space. She has just contributed a chapter on dance in Hong Kong during the 1997 handover to the upcoming collection, Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory, and the Global, edited by André Lepecki and Jenn Joy. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript about dance and city space in the Chinese diaspora. She will be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Dance Department at UC Riverside fall 2008 through winter 2009.

Diane Letoto is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i where she is also a lecturer in the Women’s Studies Program and in Political Science. Diane holds a Master of Arts Degree in Dance and in American Studies from UH. Diane is founder of a performing Chinese dance school, the Phoenix Dance Chamber where she developed the syllabus and taught Chinese teen and adult dance classes. Besides her academic and Chinese dance experience, Diane has studied hula from the Zuttermeister halau and holds a nattori from the Matsudai Shin Buyo Dance School.

E. Hollister Mathis-Masury, Assistant Professor, University of Stuttgart, Germany, Department of Sport & Movement Science. Owner/Director InCenDance — International Center for Dance (InzTanz — Internationales Zentrum für Tanz), a state-certified institution for occupational education. Founding Director TanzProduktion Tübingen e.V., a public-service, tax-exempt organization supporting regional theatrical dance. Director of 3-year pilot-project on dance in early childhood. Co-author of “TanzMedizin”, first book on dance medicine published by German chapter of IADMS (TaMeD). Professional performer in ballet, modern, musical, dance theater. Dissertation on Stuttgart Ballet and transnationalization. Teaches ballet, modern, jazz, improvisation/choreography, applied anatomy/kinesiology and dance history.

Juliet McMains is a dance scholar and artist who maintains an active career as a performer, choreographer, researcher, writer and teacher of dance. Her work centers on social dance practices (ballroom, salsa, swing, tango) and their theatrical expression on competition and theatre stages. Her first book Glamour Addiction: Inside the American Ballroom Dance Industry received the CORD 2008 Outstanding Publication Award. Juliet has a Ph.D. is Dance History and Theory from the University of California at Riverside and a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Harvard University. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Dance Program at the University of Washington.

Elizabeth McPherson received her technical training from Juilliard, followed by an MA from The City College of New York, and a Ph.D. from New York University. She is an assistant professor at Montclair State University and previously taught at Long Island University- Brooklyn, The City College of New York and NYU. Dr. McPherson has written the book The Contributions of Martha Hill to American Dance and Dance Education, 1900-1995 as well as articles and reviews for various publications such as Dance Teacher Magazine and Ballet Review. She has staged several historical dance works including Helen Tamiris’ Negro Spirituals.

Joellen A. Meglin, associate professor of dance at Temple University, was recently appointed co-editor (with Lynn Matluck Brooks) of Dance Chronicle: Studies on Dance and the Related Arts. Recent publications include a chapter on the opera-ballet Les Indes galantes in Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800 (2008) and an article on Ruth Page’s La Guiablesse in Dance Chronicle (2007). Joellen served as coordinator of doctoral studies in dance at Temple (1997–2006) and on the board of SDHS (1997–2003). Funding for her research comes from the Newberry Library, the Boyer College of Music and Dance, and Temple University.

Katherine Mezur is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington. Most recently she was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, and a Beatrice Bain Scholar (Gender Studies), University of California, Berkeley. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre and Dance, emphasis on Asian Performance, from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, an MA in Dance (Mills College) and a BA in Film and Photography (Hampshire College). She is a feminist scholar, director, and choreographer whose research focuses on gender studies, corporeality and media, and transnational performance in the Asia Pacific region. She is author of, Beautiful Boys/Outlaw Bodies: Devising Female-likeness on the Kabuki Stage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), a history of the kabuki female gender performance and its contemporary practice, aesthetics, and politics. She is currently working on the manuscript, Cute Mutant Girls: Remapping the Female Body in Contemporary Japanese Performance Art, that focuses on Japanese women choreographers/directors, performers, and visual artists who are radically transforming paradigms of the "little girl" through extreme visceral and virtual articulations in performance and media works. Current performance work includes Skin a video performance installation, "In the Flesh: cold burn, code, and choreography," a work-in-progress that is a tele-immersion dance performance, and "Animation: Fantastic Choreography" a study based on Japanese animation characters. Other projects on "performance as research" focus on collaborative transnational choreography, installation, and performance works in the Asia Pacific arena. She has held positions at Georgetown University, McGill University, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Davis. Her research has been supported by a Mellon fellowship at the California Institute of the Arts, a Fulbright research grant, a Social Science Research Council grant, and an NEH grant.

Dr Vesna Milanovic received her MA in Dance Studies from the University of Surrey, United Kingdom and her Ph.D. from the School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London, United Kingdom, thesis on Re-Embodying the Alienation of Exile: Feminist Subjectivity, Spectatorship, Politics & Performance. Researcher in Extended Body: Distance teaching in gender and performance for the Institute of New Media Performance Research, University of Surrey and Associate Researcher, SMART lab Centre, University of East London. Dancer, teacher, choreographer for various theatres, TV programmes, and Faculty of Drama in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia with interests in feminism, performance, politics, new technology, spectatorship and performance devising.

Ray Miller is a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Appalachian State University. He recently served as President for the Congress on Research in Dance (2006-2008). He has directed and choreographed over 150 musicals, plays and operas as well as choreographed for university sponsored dance concerts, He has published in Theatre Journal, Dance Research Journal. Text and Performance Quarterly, Studies in Musical Theatre and Dance Chronicle. Praeger Press will publish his book on Musical Theatre Dance: From John Durang to Susan Stroman.

Angela M. Moe is Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. Her research interests include violence against women and sociology of the body. Her work may be found in such journals as Violence Against Women, Women and Therapy, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and Women and Criminal Justice. She has served as president of the Midwest Sociologists for Women and Society; executive counselor for the American Society of Criminology, Division on Women and Crime; and founding member/deputy editor for the journal Feminist Criminology. Her CORD presentation is part of an ongoing ethnography on women’s healing through dance.

Margaret Morrison is a rhythm tap soloist, choreographer and producer who teaches and performs across the United States, Europe and Brazil. She is a graduate of Barnard College and has taught in the Barnard Dance Department since 1997. Her courses include tap technique and a studio/lecture course “Tap as an American Art.”

Shakina Nayfack is a performance artist, theatre director, and a shotgun scholar. He holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside, where he also a Doctoral Candidate in Dance History and Theory. Shakina’s creative work ranges from cult film to musical theater, while his research focuses on ritual and community in the age of globalization, specifically in relation to Butoh Mexicano, which he has been studying and practicing for nearly seven years.

Erica Nielsen is co-founder of Dance Education Solutions, an online company which combines professional dance research and educational expertise with digital media in order to create affordable, dynamic solutions for the advancement of dance education. As a graduate student in Dance at Arizona State University, Ms. Nielsen taught dance cultural studies courses and developed an interest in online learning platforms. Currently a freelance writer, her most recent dance publication is a chapter the book "Balkan Dance" by Anthony Shay.

MiRi Park (aka Seoulsonyk) teaches in the dance education program at NYU. She holds an MA in American Studies from Columbia University, a BFA in Dance and a BA in Journalism from UMass, Amherst. She has presented her work on hip-hop dance at the Conference on NY State History and the Oral History & Performance Conference, and SDHS. Her writing has appeared in The Village Voice, KoreAm Journal and Dance Spirit Magazine. MiRi dances professionally as a b-girl and modern dancer, repping with crews Fox Force Five, TEC, BIS, and with choreographers Doug Elkins, Rennie Harris, Marlies Yearby and Nia Love. She is the 2004 World & US Air Guitar Champion.

Lorenzo Perillo was born into a Navy family in Honolulu and raised in San Diego. After graduating from UC Berkeley (B.A. Integrative Biology), he took two years off to work in the medical field. Lorenzo completed an M.A. in American Studies and International Cultural Studies at University of Hawaii-Manoa in 2007. Informed by his Pilipino community work and hip-hop dance training for the last decade, Lorenzo’s research interests include Filipino, Filipino American, and hip-hop cultures. At UCLA, Lorenzo pursues a doctorate in Culture and Performance with a concentration in both Dance Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA.

Harper Piver has a BFA in Dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and an MFA from Arizona State University. She currently teaches at ASU and Scottsdale Community College.

Brent Radeke is working to complete his BFA in Dance, his BA in French Studies, and a minor in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota. As a dancer, choreographer, and writer, Brent is interested in investigating the intersections between queer sexuality and performance. Brent plans to pursue a Master's and Ph.D. in some discipline pertaining to Dance Studies and will, at the very least, continue to write about dance, always making sure to go back to the body. Brent is honored to present at CORD and is excited to take part in all the lectures and performances.

Julia Randel is Assistant Professor of Music at Hope College (Holland, Michigan). She received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2004, with a dissertation titled “Dancing With Stravinsky: Balanchine, Agon, Movements for Piano and Orchestra, and the Language of Classical Ballet.” She has presented work at national and regional meetings of the American Musicological Society, Society of Dance History Scholars, and the Harvard Theatre Collection’s Balanchine Centennial Symposium. Her current research focus is a book on Stravinsky’s ballets.

Jose Luis Reynoso, a Mexican immigrant, holds degrees in Psychology -B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) (2000) and M.A. (2003)- from California State University Los Angeles and in Choreography -M.F.A.(2006)- from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures where he is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Culture and Performance Studies. As a performer, Jose has danced/performed for and collaborated with other choreographers and performance artists nationally and internationally. His own academic and choreographic works have been presented in diverse venues in the U.S., Mexico, and France.

Danielle Robinson, Ph.D. is a dance scholar who researches the cross-cultural movement of popular dances of the African Diaspora within the Americas. Her published articles have focused on ragtime, jazz, and swing dancing in the U.S. in relation to period cultural politics. Most recently, she is pursuing a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project on Samba de Roda in Bahia, Brazil--for which she has received a multi-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research has been honored with awards from SHDS, CORD, and ATHE/ASTR. She is currently an assistant professor of Dance Studies at York University.

Heather Roffe, MFA, is currently an adjunct lecturer at SUNY College at Brockport and an adjunct professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. In the past few years, Roffe has conducted multiple action research projects with Rochester, NY area K-12 schools in the areas of dance and multidisciplinary studies, in addition to performing during her summers at Jacob’s Pillow, the International Dance Festival, the New York State Dance Festival, and the American Dance Guild Festival with Assemblage Dance Company, Burnidge-Clark Dance and Geomantics Dance Theatre. She produces the annual Bill Evans Dance Teachers Workshops, and is also helping to plan a regional American College Dance Festival. Her choreography has been presented in Brockport, Rochester, Minneapolis, New York City, Richmond, VA and at Jacob’s Pillow.

Cristina Rosa- Born in Brasilia, Brazil, Cristina Rosa is a scholar and an artist whose research focuses on Afro-Brazilian aesthetics within performance practices. Rosa has a Master degree in Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is currently engaged in her doctoral research in culture and performance studies at the World Arts and Cultures department, at UCLA.

Linda Sabo is a professional dancer, choreographer, director and teacher, was a founding faculty member of the musical theatre program at Syracuse University and presently teaches performing arts at Elon University in North Carolina. Sabo’s work has been seen in New York theatres such as BAM, Town Hall and TOMI, and various dance companies, stock and regional venues around the country. Sabo’s teaching spans 30 years in places such as Syracuse University, University of Michigan, School of Ballet Iowa, Iowa State University, Lemoyne, Colgate, and Interlochen and many of her former students have successful careers as dance, theatre, film and television professionals. Sabo studied dance at the Boston Conservatory and English at Iowa State University.

Carolina San Juan is a Doctoral Candidate in Culture and Performance at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. While her dissertation focuses on American Vaudeville in the Philippines, her research interests include the intersection of imperialism with popular culture, visual arts, and performance. As a former ballroom dance instructor turned performance artist/scholar, her projects include teaching Tinikling Hip Hop, promoting her performance/activist art spectacle, "The Imperial Mole Project," and investigating disco dance and music in the performance video, “discolevel3.proj.”

Ahalya Satkunaratnam is a 2006-2007 Fulbright-Hays fellow and a Ph.D. candidate in Dance History and Theory at the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation on Bharata Natyam dance practices in Colombo, Sri Lanka considers the ways the dance functions within a war economy, and plays within practices and beliefs of ethnic difference. Satkunaratnam is also an active dancer and choreographer. Her most recent piece, a collaboration with Sri Lankan musicians, explored cycles of memory and repetition. Prior to her current academic work, Satkunaratnam served as Art Education Director at Insight Arts, a Chicago-based arts organization committed to social justice and human rights.

Karen Schaffman is a choreographer, writer, collaborator, and life-long dancer. Her work is concerned with sensation, perception, memory, and the politics of transgression. She earned her Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory at the University of California, Riverside with her research in contact improvisation, performance, and identity. Here writing appears in Taken by Surprise: An Improvisation Reader (Wesleyan) and Contact Quarterly. She is Associate Professor at California State University, San Marcos, and travels internationally as a teacher and performer.

Anna Beatrice Scott is assistant professor in the Department of Dance at University of California, Riverside and founding Convener of the Center for Body, Performance & Dance. She specializes in the study, analysis, and performance of dance practices in the African Diaspora, with an emphasis on the performance of epidermal realities as they intersect transnational entertainment industries and local spiritual/ philosophical practices. Anna has performed professionally with Fua dia Congo, Ceedo Senegalese DanceCompany, Abiogenesis (a Chicago based performance art troupe) and Chama Compania de Dança. She is completing an e-book investigation of Carnival, Completamente Pirado: O Carnaval Depois o Novo Linguagem do Pé (Flipped-out Tongues/Wagging Heads), a multimediated, user-driven experience of the ‘Grand Folly’ and race in Bahia, Brazil with Ritsu Katsumata and the dark2digital.com collective. Anna leads the De/Cipherin' Practices Colloquium, a national gathering of scholars working in/on/through/ with the Arts of Africa and Its Diaspora. She served as Provost's Fellow in Theatre, Film and Dance at Cornell University in 2003 to 2005. Her one-woman show, Fish Tales, Rivers and Other Female Parts has been presented at UC San Diego, RISD, Brown University, and MIT. She contributed the entry of "Performance Art" to the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture, Art & History," and "Flip Flop," an essay on the object of Carnival to the forthcoming edition of Vectors On- Line Journal. Her current performance project, BORRACHA:BOUNCE, based in part on "Flip Flop," will be presented at University of Indiana this spring.

Ariel Osterweis Scott is a Ph.D. student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on questions of virtuosity, temporality, and race in contemporary dance. At UCB, Scott co-planned the 2008 Dance Under Construction conference, "Willing and Able: Re-Figuring Dance, Performance, and Disability," and the "Conference on African and Afro-Caribbean Performance." She earned her BA in Anthropology from Columbia University, and worked professionally with the dance companies Mia Michaels R.A.W., Dwight Rhoden and Desmond Richardson's Complexions, and Heidi Latsky. Her choreography, presented in New York, London, and Berkeley, has addressed pregnancy, translation, and the drawing poems of Robert Grenier

Chia-Yi Seetoo is a dancer, performer, and scholar in the doctoral program of Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She holds a B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University and an M.A. in Theatre from Northwestern University. Her academic inquiries include performances in transnational contexts, problems and prospects of translation, corporealities and “affect,” “Eastern body” aesthetics in Taiwan, and modern Chinese cultural performance. Her other interests in practice include contemporary dance, film and new media, choreography, and intermedia choreography.

Libby Smigel MFA PhD, Dance Heritage Coalition project director and faculty member of George Washington University’s Department of Theatre and Dance, heads the DHC “fair use” project among other initiatives. With Vanessa L. Jackson of Coppin State University, she is currently co-authoring and co-editing a two-volume series for Greenwood Press titled Icons of American Dance. She acts as Area Chair for Dance and Culture for the Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association, and she reviews manuscripts for the Journal of American Culture and for Dance Chronicle.

Molly Stoltz is a senior Honors Dance BFA/History Minor at the University of Minnesota, and is looking forward to her first time at CORD. She is also a performer, teacher, and stage manager and has danced with numerous artists in the Twin Cities. She intends to pursue many paths, one being a Master's in Dance Studies, and wishes to focus on tap/jazz dance writing.

Kin-Yan Szeto is an Assistant Professor of Theatre and Dance at Appalachian State University, with a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. Previously, she taught at Northwestern University and the University of California, Irvine. She is also a writer, director and performer, and her research interests are in film, media, performance and dance studies. At present, she is completing a book on transnational martial arts film and performance.

Virginia Taylor researches ballet outside the opera houses and élite practice; in the working theatre and local schools, as a participatory practice enjoyed by many people, and as a Utopian motif in popular culture. (PhD Ballerinas in the Church Hall: Ideologies of femininity, ballet, and dancing schools, Chichester 2003). In 1999 she won the SDHS’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award. Recent research in practice considered Dance and Landscape (Dances through Topological Space). From 2000-2006 Taylor was on the faculty of Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts: from 2006, Liverpool Hope University.

Victoria Thoms is Senior Lecturer in Dance Practice and Performance at the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom. She is both a practitioner and a philosopher whose primary research interest is the gendered history of dance and its effects on contemporary dance performance. She is presently working toward the completion of a book focusing on an intertextual feminist reading of the work and life of Martha Graham. Victoria is Newsletter Editor for the Society for Dance Research and has published in the Dance Research Journal, Dance Theatre Journal and the European Journal of Women’s Studies.

Andrea R. Thompson has woven African dance forms into her body for the last 15 years. Andrea studies, teaches, and performs Afro-Brazilian Samba, North African Belly Dance and Afro-Cuban. She has danced with “Sarava" an Afro-Brazilian company, "AshéMoyubba " and ?Alafia? Afro-Cuban folkloric companies. She currently teaches Afro-Cuban Dance at the University of the District of Columbia and is a board member of the Latin American Folk Institute. Andrea has allowed her politics of movement to take her to five different continents, fulfilling the roles of dance instructor, student, and patron. She holds a Bachelor of Science from Howard University.

Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is an assistant professor in the departments of English and African American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her forthcoming book, Thiefing Sugar: Reading Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Duke University Press), excavates and explores Dutch-, English-, and French-language Caribbean women’s texts between 1900 and 1990, tracing how their queering of landscape-as-female beloved metaphors imagines a poetics and erotics of decolonization.

Megan Anne Todd- I have passion about/for movement, which has cultivated in me diverse trajectories of interest/study/practice in embodied systems, ranging from Afro-diasporic dance practices to yoga, Pilates, and massage therapy. In my doctoral work I explore how artistically choreographed, as well as everyday performative practices of dance and movement, articulate, transmit, and negotiate knowledges, literacies, and identities, and how these practices may impact individual and social wellness and healing. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre and Performance of the Americas at ASU, with an M.S. in Exercise and Wellness from ASU (thesis: Yoga and Distractibility) and B.A. in English and Language, Reading, and Culture of the Americas from KSC. I am the mother of two beautiful children, Santiago and Zora.

Jennifer Tsukayama is the Performing Arts Director for the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She is also a Tenured Professor in Dance.

Marietta Ulacia, a Cuban-born founder and Director of the Latin American Folk Institute (LAFI). She is a musician, dancer and arts educator who has been teaching and performing Afro-Cuban dance in the Mid-Atlantic area for over 10 years, specializing in the Yorùbá tradition. She developed a dance program for children K-5 for the Children?s Museum in Baltimore and is currently working in New York City. Ms. Ulacia studied music at the prestigious Amadeo Roldan Conservatory in Havana, and folkloric dance with the Folklorico Nacional in Cuba. She holds a M.A. in Arts Management from American University in Washington, DC.

Pegge Vissicaro, PhD, began working with refugees in metropolitan Phoenix in 2002, to facilitate development of dance as a strategy to reduce resettlement trauma. Her pioneering work in this area includes publications in Ethnic Studies Review and Animated and presentations at the 2004 CORD Conference, Gainesville, FL, 2005 CORD Conference, Tallahasee, FL, and 2003 International Conference on Pulses and Impulses for Dance in the Community, Almada, Portugal. This year, Dr. Vissicaro will serve as a Fulbright Senior Specialist, Lisbon, Portugal, investigating refugee dance communities. She is currently Associate Chair at Arizona State University, Herberger College Dance and President of Cross-Cultural Dance Resources.

Hui Niu Wilcox, Ph.D., Sociology Department, Critical Studies and Race and Ethnicity, Women’s Studies, College of St. Catherine. Principal dancer with Ananya Dance Theatre. Mother of Claire (5) and Lynn (3). Current research project: Chinese dance in North America, ethnic construction, and colorblind multiculturalism.

Dr. Liesbeth Wildschut graduated at the Fontys Dance Academy (1973). As a dancer and choreographer she was involved in performances for young children. In 1995, she graduated in Theatre Studies at Utrecht University (cum laude), where she is now senior lecturer in dance history, theory and dramaturgy at the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies. Her main research interests include emotional and physical involvement strategies of people watching a dance performance. In collaboration with Jo Butterworth she edited The Routledge Reader in Contemporary Choreography (forthcoming).

Sara Wolf is a doctoral candidate, teaching fellow, and Javitz fellow in UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures; a freelance dance critic for the Los Angeles Time; and co-editor of the journal/zine itch. Her dissertation examines twenty-first-century postmodern dance, performance, and activist interventions as citizen choreographies that formulate critical alternatives to national identifications and re-imagine bodies politic in relation to global media, capital, and war.

Naomi Wood is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. She will complete her preliminary exams this November. While located within a language and literature department her current research encompasses dance and gender studies. Her dissertation addresses constructions of national identity as articulated through dancing bodies located in the politically transitioning nations of Cuba and Brazil in the mid-to-late twentieth century. She is interested in hip-hop as a corporeal translator and avenue for invisiblized bodies to create space.

Emily Wright, MFA, is a professor in the department of dance at Belhaven College in Jackson, MS. She received her BFA in Dance from Belhaven College and her MFA in Dance with an emphasis on Performance and Choreography from Arizona State University. As a member of various Christian dance communities, her research focuses on contemporary trends in Christian dance from both insider and outsider perspectives in the context of current and historic tensions. Ms. Wright employs an autoethnographic approach to choreography as well in her collaborations with Front Porch Dance Theater, a local contemporary dance company.

SheenRu Yong is currently an MFA candidate at Taipei National University of the Arts. Originally from the US, she started dancing at Wesleyan University where she received her BA in Letters and Dance. Her current research/choreographic interests include interdisciplinary and community collaboration, somatic practices and creative applications, as well as ritual and embodied enactment.

Rim Zahra is Ph.D. candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis. She holds an M.A. in English literature from Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, California. She has authored " Virtual Reality: Elizabethan Theatre and William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream," a chapter in Lost and found in virtual reality: Women and information technology, edited by Hannakaisa Isomaki now at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, and Anneli Pohjola at the University of Lapland, Finland. Currently, her dissertation research traces how, since the 1920s, Disney has employed aspects of theatricality in their animated productions and theme parks to shape and direct the cultural imaginary about American values and the American dream.