Graduate Zoom Workshop Series 2022, Speaker Bios
Registration HERE

Elizabeth June Bergman (she, her) is a dancer, interdisciplinary scholar, and educator who researches the cultural history and production culture of the U.S. commercial dance industry. She received her Ph.D. from Temple University where she was a University Fellow and an Associate Graduate Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at Temple. Elizabeth also holds an MFA from The University of Iowa and is certified at the 500-hour level as a hatha yoga instructor. She has taught movement and/or dance studies courses for Muhlenberg College, Point Park University, Bryn Mawr College, Temple University, and The University of Iowa. She currently serves as Chair of the Americas node of Pop Moves, an international research group for popular dance and performance.  

Meiver De la Cruz (she/they) is an artist and scholar interested in the intersections of movement performance, diaspora cultures, and race, gender and sexuality. They have had more than a few contingent academic jobs which they are happy to tell you about! Meiver is also a member of the DSA's elected Board of Directors. Born and raised in the Dominican Republic, she is currently based in Long Beach, California. She is hopeful for a better world. 

Lizzie Leopold (she, her) is the Executive Director of DSA and a Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago. As an independent researcher, Leopold is currently co-editing a two volume anthology entitled Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories.  Under contract with the University of Illinois Press, Leopold and co-editor Susan Manning are organizing 48 essays spanning from the Chicago World's Fair to the present moment, across genres and geographies.  She received an interdisciplinary PhD in Theater and Drama from Northwestern University. Her essays have been published in Perspectives on American Dance (University Press of Florida), Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and Dance (Oxford University Press), and Futures of Dance Studies (University of Wisconsin Press, Studies in Dance History series). Leopold is also a choreographer and the director of the Leopold Group, a 2018 Links Hall Co-Mission Resident Artist.

Amanda Reid (she, her) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center and a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies. She writes and teaches about dance, queer theory, transnational historical methodologies, and post-colonial Caribbean black radicalism. Her current manuscript project, Smaddification: Dance and West Indian Decolonization,explores maximalist queer diaspora aesthetics in Jamaican concert dance to theorize West Indian visions of Blackness, bodily freedom, and cultural autonomy. She received her PhD from the Department of History at The University of Michigan. Amanda will join Yale's Theatre and Performance Studies department as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2022.

Jade Power-Sotomayor (she/her/Ella) is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar, performer, dramaturg, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Engaging with discourses of embodiment and embodied practices of remembering and creating community, her work focuses on the fluid reconstitution of Latinx identity ultimately produced by doing and not simply being. Her research interests include: Latinx theatre and performance, dance studies, nightlife, eco-dramaturgies, epistemologies of the body, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora. Dr. Power-Sotomayor is currently working on a monograph called ¡Habla!:Speaking Bodies in Latinx Dance and Performance in which she theorizes her concept of "embodied code-switching" across distinct “Latinx” social dance spaces.  In 2021, her essay “Corporeal Sounding: Listening to Bomba Dance, Listening to puertorriqueñxs” won the Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research and her essay “Moving Borders and Dancing in Place: Son jarocho’s Speaking Bodies at the Fandango Fronterizo” received the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Dance Studies Association. She also recently co-edited a special issue of CENTRO Journal for Puerto Rican Studies called "Puerto Rican Bomba: Syncopating Bodies, Histories, Geographies" and collaborates on the Bomba Wiki project, a crowdsourced online bomba archive. Publications can be found in TDRPerformance Matters, Latino Studies Journal, Latin American Theatre Review and The Oxford Handbook of Theatre and Dance.

Priya Srinivasan is a dancer/choreographer/researcher who lives on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people. Her multidisciplinary practice combines dance, theory, performance ethnography, anti-colonial, equity and racial justice frameworks within a deeply embedded community-engaged practice to act as a catalyst for social, cultural and political change.   She has worked across the globe to challenge Western hegemonic beliefs and practices, directing interventions in the arts through large-scale and intimate projects within international festivals and has collaborated on major projects with the Hermitage Museum Amsterdam, Berlin Wall Memorial, Rockbund Art Museum Shanghai, Typografia Gallery Romania, Showroom Gallery London, Dakshina Chitra and Spaces Chennai, Adishakti Puducherry, Highways Los Angeles, DCA Darwin, Dancehouse, Bunjil Place and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in Melbourne. She is the co-Artistic Director of Sangam which she founded in 2019 as a corrective to the lack of opportunities for artists of colour in Melbourne enabling classical, contemporary, popular and experimental works on one platform. She has worked as the Interim Co-CEO of Multicultural Arts Victoria working towards equity and inclusion in the performance sector. She has a PhD in Performance Studies, was an Associate Professor at UCR and is the author of “Sweating Saris: Indian Dance as Transnational Labor.”

Sarah Wilbur (she/hers) is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Dance and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Dance Program at Duke University. She is a choreographer and dance/performance researcher who studies arts labor, economics, and institutional support, principally in a US context. Sarah brings a strong field orientation to bear on this work, including over twenty years of experience working across the realms of concert dance, theatre, musical theater, opera, K-12 education, health care, and Veterans’ Affairs. Her current (2021) book Funding Bodies is the first book-length study to historicize and track the relationship between patterns of arts funding and dance’s aesthetic and organizational norms. Sarah teaches courses on arts labor and cultural economies, studio courses in improvisation and choreography, and topics courses in dance and performance studies.It is her primary goal to credit arts labor and laborers in all aspects of her professional work. https://scholars.duke.edu/person/sarah.wilbur