Indeterminate States: Bodies, Fields, Praxis
George Washington University, Washington DC USA
June 25-29, 2025 Conference
Co-Chairs: Juliet Bellow (American University), Manuel Cuellar (George Washington University), Brendan Fernandes (Northwestern University), Anna Jayne Kimmel (George Washington University)
The 2025 DSA conference will be held in Washington, D.C. This return to the United States after three years will come at a critical juncture: it will arrive in the wake of a contested presidential election as well as uprisings and conflicts across the globe. The District of Columbia represents the country’s multinational operations and global engagements both symbolically (through its architecture and monuments) and in practice (through the work of foreign embassies, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations). Against this backdrop of political authority, the District itself remains in an indeterminate state: international and local, transient and residential, the nation’s capital yet itself stateless. The city maintains deep historical, cultural, and community legacies under its national monuments, whose narratives remain open to contestation.
Read Full Call-for-Papers in English, Spanish, and Portuguese HERE.
Submissions now HERE (deadline December 16th)
Guidelines Submissions HERE
PHOTO: Brendan Fernandes, Image still from "Free Fall for Camera" (2019)
Conference Advertising, Exhibiting, Sponsorship info: HERE
Conference Advertising, Exhibiting, Sponsorship reservation: HERE
- Exhibitor Table: $500 ($200 for each additional table)
- Virtual Exhibitor Page: $150
- Display by book: $50 in-person/$25 virtual
- Digital Banner Ad: $300
- Digital App Push Notification: $100
- E-blast Newsletter Advertising: $100-$50 (HERE)
- Sponsorships ($5000-$250)
Conference Co-Chair is a service position and DSA is deeply grateful for the volunteer labor of these four DSA members.
Juliet Bellow is Associate Professor of Art History at American University. Her publications include Dancing around Rodin: Sculptural Performances in Belle Époque Paris (forthcoming from Yale University Press) and Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Ashgate, 2013); articles in Art Bulletin, Art Journal, American Art, and Modernism/modernity; chapters in edited volumes including The Cambridge Companion to Ballet, The Modernist World, Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870-1914, and Arabesque Without End: Across Music and the Arts, from Faust to Shahrazad;and contributions to exhibition catalogs on Sonia Delaunay (Tate Modern/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris), Merce Cunningham (Walker Art Center), Henri Matisse Musée d’Orsay/Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Auguste Rodin (Courtauld Institute of Art/Musée Rodin, Paris).
Manuel Ricardo Cuellar is Associate Professor of Latin American and Latinx Studies at The George Washington University. His research primarily engages questions of performance, especially as they concern dance, indigeneity, and Afro-mestizo imaginaries in Mexico, combining ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and studies of contemporary and classical Nahuatl, Mexico’s most widely spoken and written Indigenous language. Cuellar’s strong background in Mexican traditional dance has led him to explore dance’s role in Mexican national identity, indigeneity, and queerness in Mexico and the United States. He is also part of Corazón Folklórico Dance Company in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in Performance Research, A Contracorriente, Mexican Transnational Cinema and Literature, Ethnohistory, and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others. Cuellar is the author of Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation (UT Press 2022), winner of the 2023 de la Torre Bueno First Book Award by the Dance Studies Association.
Anna Jayne Kimmel (sher/her) is Assistant Professor of Dance at The George Washington University. Her scholarship amplifies the intersection of legal humanities and performance studies, with particular attention to francophone histories and moments of public assembly. In addition, Kimmel pursues community-engaged research in carceral studies, fostering collaboration with artists in confinement and serving as a restorative justice facilitator for alternative accountability programs in the DMV area. As a dancer, she has performed the works of Ohad Naharin, Francesca Harper, Trisha Brown, John Jasperse, Olivier Tarpaga, and Susan Marshall, amongst others.
Her scholarship appears in Dance Research Journal, Performance Research, Lateral, The Drama Review (TDR), and The Brooklyn Rail, as well as various edited volumes. Her current book manuscripts, Performing Law (co-edited with Peter Goodrich and Bernadette Meyler) and Legal Moves, are forthcoming. She serves on the board of Performance Studies International and is an Associate Editor for Performance Research.
Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan’s projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan’s projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. Brendan is also the recipient of the Artadia Award (2019), a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020) and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019). His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago and Susan Inglett Gallery in New York. Recent and upcoming projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, CA; Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway; a collaboration with Danish National Radio, Copenhagen, Denmark, and a two person show at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA.
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