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Session 31	Choreographing Feminist Spaces: Ananya Dance Theatre
	Hui Wilcox, Maija Brown, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley
	Dancing to Witness, Dancing to Transform
	This paper offers a dancer’s perspective on working and performing with Ananya Dance Theatre, a women-of-color dance company based in Minneapolis. I reflect on the ways in which the transgressive and resistive space and works of ADT have allowed me to bear witness to traumas and struggles of women from diverse communities in the Global South and to interrogate and transform my own identities as a an immigrant, an Asian American, a woman of color, and an activist-artist. ADT’s collective journey attests to embodied performance’s power to witness, to transform, to build community, and to evoke hope.
	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.
	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.
	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.
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