Dr. Brenda Dixon Gottschild 2022-23 Mellon Fellow

Portrait

Brenda Dixon-Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner of the 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance.

Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016); a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017); and a Dance Magazine Award (2022).

A self-described anti-racist cultural worker utilizing dance as her medium, Dixon-Gottschild is a freelance writer, consultant, performer, and lecturer; a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine; and Professor Emerita of dance studies, Temple University. As an artist-scholar, she coined the phrase “choreography for the page” to describe her embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.

Nationwide and abroad, she curates post-performance reflexive dialogues, writes critical performance essays, performs self-created solos, and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild, in a genre they developed and titled “movement theater discourse.”

During her residency, Dr. Dixon-Gottschild will participate in events about her work and distinguished career and curate events about the erasure of Blackness from dance forms such as ballet and flamenco.

Land Acknowledgement

The Hemispheric Institute at New York University acknowledges with respect the Lenape nation, whose traditional homelands NYU now occupies. We recognize the longstanding significance of these territories for Lenape nations past and present. We acknowledge that we work in a city with the largest urban Native population in the United States. Even as we work to increase the historical awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure, we acknowledge the effect of that legacy in educational institutions, at NYU, and across the hemisphere. We are committed to work revealing Indigenous history and life-worlds and to the inclusion of Indigenous voices and participation, in allyship with Indigenous makers and communities across the Americas.

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The Hemispheric Institute gathers artists, scholars, writers, learners, and activists from across the Americas. We focus on social justice and research politically engaged culture and performance. We share this work in digital archives and amplify it through dialogues and public scholarship, residencies, publications, and gatherings. Our dynamic, multilingual network traverses disciplines and borders and is grounded in the fundamental belief that artistic practice and critical reflection can spark lasting cultural change.

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