Events

Conversation 1

Video Archiving as History

Participant bios

Jehan Roberson is a queer writer, scholar, artist, and memory worker using text as the basis for her interdisciplinary practice. Born and raised in Memphis, TN, Jehan’s work explores text as a site of liberation, place making, and historical intervention for Black peoples in the Americas. Her art and research have informed her previous work in archives and cultural sites such as the National Civil Rights Museum and the Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis, Kismet Productions in Chicago, and the Borges Cultural Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Jehan is a PhD student in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. 

Dr. Linda Caruso Haviland, is Professor Emerita of Dance at Bryn Mawr College and the founder of its dance program. She also directed and taught in Bryn Mawr’s critical thinking and writing program for first year students and has received both the College’s Rosalyn R. Schwartz teaching award as well as its McPherson Award for Excellence. Prior to her work at Bryn Mawr College, Caruso Haviland founded the dance program at SUNY/Westchester Community College and taught in several colleges and universities including Temple University and The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She received her undergraduate degree in dance from Adelphi University and completed her doctorate in the areas of dance and philosophy at Temple University. She performed for over four decades with choreographers in New York, in Philadelphia—principally with ZeroMoving Company under the direction of Hellmut Fricke Gottschild, with independent choreographers and in her own work. Her scholarly research has included preserving the work of significant Philadelphia dance artists through oral histories and video documentation; research into the rise of a professional class of dancers in Philadelphia at the turn to the 20th century; and the role of bodiedness in both historiography and the archive.  She is currently working with Mr. Gottschild on the documentation of his life and career. She is co-editor of the anthology The Sentient Archive: Bodies, Performance, and Memory.

Dr. Lela Aisha Jones is a movement performance artist and an interdisciplinary collaborator. Her work intimately intertwines personal and collective lived experiences of diasporic blackness as archived in and excavated from the body through dance. She is a proud native of Tallahassee, FL and feels quite fortunate to live and create in Philadelphia, PA. Her movement manifestations are grounded in notions of a traditional continuum and her current artistic, research, educational, and pedagogical orientations are inquiries into embodied restorative activism, a diasporic nomadic, diasporic citizenship, embodied memoir, and reviving the body to thriving, through temporal release and restoration. Lela is a 2015 Leeway Foundation Transformation Awardee, a 2016 Pew Fellow in the Arts, and a 2017 New York Dance and Performance Award | Bessie Nominee.

Conversation 2

Dr. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild’s Legacy

Participant bios

jaamil olawale kosoko is a multi-spirited Nigerian American author, performance artist, and curator of Yoruba and Natchez descent originally from Detroit, MI. jaamil’s work in performance is rooted in embodied ritual practice, poetics, Black critical studies, and queer theories of the body as a means to conjure and craft perpetual modes of freedom, healing, and care when/where/however possible. Their website is jaamil.com.

Dr. Ananya Chatterjea/ অনন্যা চট্টোপাধ্যায়‘s work as choreographer, dancer, and thinker brings together Contemporary Dance, social justice choreography, and a commitment to healing justice. She is the creator of Yorchhā, ADT’s signature movement vocabulary, and is the primary architect of Shawngrām, the company’s justice- and community-oriented choreographic meth-odology. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Choreography Fellow, a 2012 and 2021 McKnight Choreography Fellow, a 2016 Joyce Award recipient, a 2018 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, a 2019 Dance/USA Artist Fellow, and recipient of the 2021 A. P. Andersen Award. Her work has toured to international venues such as the Bethlehem International Performing Arts Festival, Palestine (2018), Crossing Boundaries Festival, Ethiopia, (2015), Harare International Dance Festival, Zimbabwe (2013), New Waves Institute of Dance and Performance, Trinidad (2012), and Aavejak Avaaz Festival, India (2018), and to prestigious domes-tic venues such as Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Pittsburgh; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboy-gan; Dance Place, Washington; Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Maui; The Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Painted Bride Theater, Philadelphia; among others. Ananya is Professor of Dance at the University of Minnesota where she teaches courses in Dance Studies and contemporary practice. Her second book, Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreo-graphies, re-framing understandings of Contemporary Dance from the perspective of dance-makers from global south locations (Palgrave McMillan, 2020) was awarded the 2022 Brockett Book Prize by Dance Studies Association. Her most recent publication is an anthology, Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice (Univ. of Washington Press, 2022), co-edited with Hui Wilcox and Alessandra Williams. Ananya is grateful to all the artists and collaborators she works with for their light and practice of excellence, and is thankful to her family for their support.

Since first encountering live Flamenco, award-winning dancer Aliesha Bryan (Pájaro Negro) has developed a rich and diverse tapestry of movement from which to create. After winning first place at the NYS Flamenco Certamen (now Flamenco Certamen USA), Aliesha has gone on to perform in local, national and international dance festivals, receiving multiple invitations to perform at the United Nations Headquarters, Terraza 7, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, and others. She was shortlisted for a Fresh Tracks residency at New York Live Arts, a beloved institution known for launching emerging dance talent, and has been the recipient of numerous grants in recognition of her growing body of work. Aliesha choreographed and has performed the Spanish Hot Chocolate variation in The Brooklyn Nutcracker since 2018 and was recently a lecturer as part of the Camille A. Brown & Dancers Social Dance for Social Change series curated by Brenda Dixon Gottschild. She has been featured in Dance Magazine for her role in diversifying the Flamenco landscape. Aliesha also recently embarked on the creation of her own venture, Blackbird Dances, an extemporaneous dance company that synthesizes depth psychology in movement with traditional Flamenco expressivity.

Dr. K. Meira Goldberg is a flamenco performer, choreographer, teacher, and scholar. In 1980s Madrid, she performed nightly in flamenco tablaos alongside the best artists in the world. In the US, she was the first dancer with Carlota Santana, Fred Darsow, and Pasión y Arte. Since going grey, she has instigated and collaborated on 100 Years of Flamenco in NYC (NYPL, 2013), Flamenco on the Global Stage (McFarland, 2015), The Global Reach of the Fandango in Music, Song and Dance (Cambridge Scholars, 2016), Transatlantic Malagueñas and Zapateados in Music, Song, and Dance (Cambridge Scholars, 2019), Indígenas, africanos, roma y europeos. Ritmos transatlánticos en música, canto y baile (Música Oral del Sur, 2021), and Celebrating Flamenco’s Tangled Roots: The Body Questions (Cambridge Scholars, 2022). Her monograph, Sonidos Negros: On the Blackness of Flamenco (Oxford University Press, 2019 and, translated by Kiko Mora, Libargo 2022), won the Barnard Hewitt Award for best 2019 book in theatre history or cognate disciplines, as well as Honorable Mention for the Sally Banes Publication Award, both from the American Society for Theatre Research.

Dr. E. Gaynell Sherrod spent 15 years performing, touring, and teaching with celebrated companies PHILADANCO! and Urban Bush Women, Inc. She is a Fulbright-Hayes scholar in dance research. Her artistic and theoretical works are steeped in the dance and music of the African American vernacular and the African Diaspora – mentored by acclaimed scholars Drs. Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Kariamu Welsh and (the late) Katie G. Cannon. From 2001-2003, she was the Director of Dance Education for New York City public schools, wherein she designed and implemented professional training initiatives for dance educators, teaching artists, and classroom teachers. Most notably she co-founded and directed the New York City Department of Education Dance Institute: Based on the Katherine Dunham Model, for which she was awarded a DANA Foundation Grant. Dr. Sherrod began her academic teaching career at New Jersey City University and New York University (NYU). From 2004-2014, she taught at Florida A&M University (FAMU), earning tenure (Associate Professor) and subsequently becoming the Interim Chair of the Department of Health, Physical Education and Recreation (HPER). In 2014, Dr. Sherrod joined the faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) as Chair of the Department of Dance and Choreography, for which she served for three years. Currently, she is a professor in Dance at VCU, after having served as the Interim Executive Director of PHILDANCO! from 2019-2020. She is the author of Katherine Dunham and The Dance Griots: Reading the Invisible Script (Mellen Press - 2022).