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Presenter bios:
Francesca Ferrer-Best is a PhD candidate with the department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her doctoral research is motived by academic feminism’s tendency towards pathologising ballet dancers, and aims to unearth and communicate dancers’ experiences in an in-depth, embodied analysis of how ballet dancers interface with the world. It employs Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s and Iris Marion Young’s work in phenomenology to get at the different scales and situated nature of dance experience. Francesca’s broader research interests include phenomenology, movement cultures, embodiment and drinking. Outside university, she is involved in the independent dance-making community in Sydney.
Siobhan Murphy is a dance artist and academic based in Melbourne. Her dance career began with the Deutsche Oper Ballet in Berlin in 1992, performing classical and contemporary repertoire. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Spanish at the University of New South Wales in 2000 while beginning her independent choreographic practice. In 2009 she completed a practice-led PhD in Choreography at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. In recent years, her practice has focused on screendance works for single channel and gallery installation outcomes. Siobhan’s current research centres on screendance portraiture, seen in her portraits of dancers Jo White and Alice Cummins, and her article* on the intersections between visual art portraiture, solo dance and screendance portraits.
Lightning presenter bios:
Hailing from Berlin, Dr Elena Benthaus is a Sessional (Adjunct) Lecturer, currently living and working in Naarm (Melbourne) in so-called Australia. As a very very interdisciplinary dance studies scholar, her research on dance on the popular screen sits in between the disciplines and theoretical lineages of screendance studies, screen studies, cultural studies, popular culture and popular music studies, and fandom/spectatorship studies. Elena’s scholarship can be found in The International Journal of Screendance and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition. They also currently serve as the Chair of PoP Moves Australia/Australasia and create so-called tiny office dances on their Instagram account with the handle @tiny_office_dances.
Dr. Maïko Le Lay is a French and Japanese scholar-practitioner. She currently works as a postdoctoral scholar in the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine. Le Lay received her PhD in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Her doctoral research on embodied hip hop pedagogies advocates for more performative and culturally sustaining practices in K-12 and higher education classrooms. More specifically, she conducted an ethnography and performed choreographic readings of hip hop events, dance classes, and lectures, and examined the tensions between Western and hip hop epistemologies in these Western institutional spaces. Le Lay possesses a MA in Political Sciences from the Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) and a MA in Media and Cultural Studies from the Universite Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle (France). Le Lay started a YouTube channel during the pandemic to render embodied practices more accessible to wider audiences.
Kathryn Nusa Logan is a collaborative interdisciplinary artist who utilizes experimental art practices to explore perspective, lineages, and imagined futures. Her current research is based in integrated dance-with-camera works that holistically consider the camera in the making process. Through this work she is interrogating the dominant gaze by engaging in new, somatic-based practices of looking and interacting with cameras. She is dedicated to the slow work of dismantling systems of oppression in the arts, which starts at the hyper-local level in her artwork and teaching, and through the collaboration of the DiGS Anti-Racist Working Group at The Ohio State University (u.osu.edu/arwg). She is investigating how scholarship and practices in somatics, dance therapy, and trauma can be activated in dance education to address systemic oppression in the body. Kathryn holds a BFA from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and an MFA from The Ohio State University.
madison moore is an artist-scholar, DJ and assistant professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. madison is the author of Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), a cultural analysis of fabulousness. He has lectured at the Yale School of Drama, the Barbican, the Perth Festival, The School of Life Melbourne, Columbia College Chicago, Performance Space Sydney, American Realness and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. madison is currently writing a book about ephemeral traces, rave scenes and queer of color undergrounds.
Please note that this video is currently unlisted; it will be made public once the closed captioning is updated at the conclusion of the conference. The contributions on which these presentations are based will be published in the special issue of The International Journal of Screendance, This Is Where We Dance Now: Covid-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen, guest-edited by Harmony Bench and Alexandra Harlig.