![]() A letter from DSA's Executive Director - 1.13.25Dear DSA members, Please allow me to introduce myself as the new Executive Director for the DSA. I look forward to serving the dance community collectively, as well as working individually with many of you in the days and months to come. I will keep this brief today as I write while under an evacuation warning order from the wildfires raging through Los Angeles, California at this very moment. My heart goes out to anyone who is affected by this tragedy and I appreciate those of you who have already reached out to offer your support. Myself and my son are safe, yet this week has shown us the essentiality of being in community and showing grace to one another. I am based in Los Angeles, California where I have been on the dance faculty at Loyola Marymount University for the past twenty years. At LMU, I teach the senior thesis mentorship course, as well as choreography, and History of Theatre Dance with an emphasis on new narratives of inclusion. My scholarship has been a career-long investigation into the work of San Francisco choreographer Alonzo King and the company he co-founded with Robert Rosenwasser in 1982: Alonzo King LINES Ballet. After many years of contributing work on LINES to various publications, I am currently writing the monograph that will be both King and LINES’ history. I have a long history with DSA leading back to both SDHS and CORD. I served as the Corresponding Secretary for the SDHS Executive board under Presidents Janice Ross and Thomas DeFrantz and later had the opportunity to edit an issue of Conversations on contemporary ballet with Dr. Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel. Kathrina and I took the ideas incubated in that issue as momentum to develop, curate, and edit The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet. I am grateful for the ways in which DSA has directed my career and that I can now give back. As Lizzie shared in her final correspondence last month, we ask for your patience as we go through a complicated leadership transition in the coming months. You can now reach DSA staff and leadership via the channels listed below:
I appreciate you taking the time to read this and for being members. As we seem to lead lives in perpetual motion that often isolate, it is my hope that DSA can be a space of acknowledgment, welcome, and support to all whenever they need it. Whether you have just joined or have been a lifelong member, thank you, and my best for 2025. With grace, Jill Nunes Jensen, Ph.D.
Jill Nunes Jensen, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Dance Studies Association (DSA). She is a longtime member of the dance faculty at Loyola Marymount University where she teaches dance history, choreography, and senior thesis mentorship. Jill also has developed and leads a biweekly Artistic Inquiry course at The Trudl Zipper Dance Institute at the Colburn School in Los Angeles. For years, her research has been the primary scholarship on Alonzo King LINES Ballet and she has presented on the company internationally. Jill’s work has been widely published in the journals Dance Chronicle and Theatre Survey and the books When Men Dance, Perspectives on American Dance: The Twentieth Century, and Re-thinking Dance History (2nd ed.). Jill has organized conferences in Los Angeles and New York City, and has served on the executive board of the former SDHS. She has been an invited speaker at the San Francisco Ballet’s Boundless Symposium (2018), Duke University (2019), and the University of Maryland (2021). In 2021 she co-hosted a conversation with leading contemporary ballet choreographers and artists: Justin Peck, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Cathy Marston, and Adji Cissoko about the state of ballet. As co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (2021), the first treatment of contemporary ballet as a discipline, her work seeks to shift the discourse of ballet studies toward narratives of inclusion. Currently, she is writing the first monograph on Alonzo King LINES Ballet, a San Francisco-based company founded by King and Robert Rosenwasser in 1982. |