I am a scholar, educator, and practitioner. My research broadly considers the relation of performance histories to practices of racial violence and white supremacy in the United States, with a focus on the intersection of race, embodiment, and movement-based performance. I received my PhD from the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Theatre Arts and my MA from the University at Buffalo’s English Department. I am also a graduate of St. Olaf College. From 2014-2015 I was the Interdisciplinary Arts Coordinator at Vassar College, directing a grant – Creative Arts Across Disciplines – from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Currently I am an Associate Professor of Dance Studies in the Department of Theatre & Dance at the University at Buffalo where I serve as Director of Graduate Studies for our MA, MFA, and PhD programs.
My first book Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, January 2022) is a history of twenty-first century US American performance that analyzes the choreography of Bill T. Jones as public intellectual labor, Black aesthetic praxis, and historical knowledge. Democracy Moving indexes the potentialities of the moving body and of the kinesthetic as interventions into political ideologies, tracking the ways that democratic social and aesthetic formations might or might not move us towards just and equitable collectivities. Through an intertwined materialist and formalist approach, Democracy Moving demonstrates how aesthetic formations and questions of how and why we remember the past interanimate one another through the meaning-making work of movement.
I am at work on my second monograph, Reparative Encounters: Universities, the Arts, and the Afterlives of Dispossession. This project maps and illuminates how the arts have been used to consolidate power and maintain investments in whiteness as part of universities’ identities, as well as the ways that aesthetic projects by minoritarian artists offer counter-methods of flourishing for systemically marginalized communities. Reparative Encounters traces the survivance of Black and Indigenous aesthetic production through an analysis of how and why universities fund the arts in response to their historical entwinement with racialized dispossession, specifically enslavement and settler colonialism in the US.
In support of my second book, I was a selected participant in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded Sawyer Seminar “Race and Public History” at the University of Virginia from 2022-2023. Prior, I was a 2021-2022 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. In fall 2019 I was a Humanities Institute Fellow at the University at Buffalo in support of the completion of Democracy Moving. My research has been recognized with the Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research, the Vera Mowry Roberts Award from the American Theatre and Drama Society, and, most recently, the Robert A. Schanke Theatre Research Award from the Mid-America Theatre Conference. I serve on the editorial boards of Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas and The Journal of American Drama and Theatre and as the Book Review Editor for Theatre History Studies. I am also a choreographer and dramaturg.
Ariel Nereson 