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Presenter bios:
Callum Anderson is a Brighton-based contemporary dance artists and screendance director, working across live and digital performance. He has made work for large scale screens, portable devices and installations. As an independent artist-scholar, his practice is heavily influenced by video technology, and the development of digital and mediated dance performance. His work is predicated on making screendance accessible to a wider non-dance community, and giving dance communities the opportunity to experiment with video technology. Callum holds a BA (Hons) Dance, and MA Performance; Dance from the University of Chichester, and received the Valerie Briginshaw Prize for Dance Writing and Academic Excellence for his MA thesis, From big screen to screen dance; queering the heterocentric. Callum has performed and choreographed for physical theatre and 360º sound performances, performance-art events and music videos, alongside more traditional theatre settings.
Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa is an Assistant Professor of Dance Studies in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance Department at UC Los Angeles. She is a scholar and practitioner of Indigenous dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous sign language), martial arts, and yoga, and performs and publishes her poetry in a variety of venues. She has received major fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the UC President’s Postdoctoral Program, and the Hellman Fellows Fund. Her book project, Settler Colonial and Decolonial Choreographies: Native American Embodiment in Educational and Carceral Contexts, theorizes how and why the U.S. has attempted to manage Native mobilities, and conversely, how Native bodies and movement forms have carried, generated, and transmitted knowledge in and beyond institutions of confinement. She is a co-founder and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Race and Yoga journal and has served as a guest editor for special issue journals that feature writing by people who are imprisoned. She has taught a wide range of interdisciplinary and community-engaged courses at public, private, tribal, and carceral institutions. For her pedagogical projects that bridge the academy and off-campus communities, in 2020, she was the first Assistant Professor at UCLA to receive a Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars.
Dr. Kate Mattingly is an Assistant Professor at the University of Utah where she teaches courses in dance histories, dance studies, and dance criticism. Her undergraduate degree is in Architecture: History and Theory, and from Princeton University, and her MFA in Dance is from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and her doctoral degree in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media is from University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has been published in the New York Times, Convergence, Performance Research, Mapping Meaning, Dance Chronicle, International Journal of Screendance, and Dance Research Journal. In 2019, Dr. Mattingly organized and was awarded funding to host “Dancing Around Race: Whiteness in Higher Education” with colleagues Gerald Casel (UCSC), Rebecca Chaleff (UCSD), Kimani Fowlin (Drew University), and Tria Blu Wakpa (UCLA). In 2020 she was selected for a Faculty Fellow Award, which provided a semester of leave from teaching to focus on research for her book, Set in Motion: Dance Criticism and the Choreographic Apparatus. Her teaching and research are invested in interrogating obstacles to inclusion and dismantling barriers to access in dance education and professional settings.
Dara Milovanovic is an Assistant Professor of Dance and Head of the Department of Music and Dance at University of Nicosia in Cyprus. Dara holds a PhD in Dance Studies from Kingston University London, UK and an MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University. Dara teaches contextual dance studies, dance research, contemporary dance technique and jazz dance. Her work has been published in books and journals, such Perspectives on American Dance: The Twentieth Century, Peephole Journal, Dance Research, and Fifty Contemporary Choreographers (Third Edition). Her research interests include popular dance, musical theatre, screendance, and film phenomenology. Dara is an active contemporary dance performer in Cyprus.
Lightning presenter bios:
Sandhiya Kalyanasundaram is a dance educator, choreographer and poet. She partners with local communities to develop sustainable foodscaping and urban restoration. Before her work with the environment, she was a researcher in the field of Neuroscience. Trained in Bharatanatyam, Butoh and Flamenco, Sandhiya has led and performed in several collaborative performances between dance styles, served on the Jury Panel for the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival and used dance therapy to work with survivors of domestic violence. She enjoys working at the intersection of science, technology and art and is currently expanding her research into the role of dance in science education. Sandhiya’s focus areas include delving into the tensions between word and meaning through dance, reflection of artistic processes, particularly imagination, improvisation and abstraction of form.
Elisa Frasson is an Italian researcher interested in dance and sound ecosystems. With extensive experience in organizational contexts of screendance events, dance into the urban space and mentoring students in creating their own work, she has been working as a freelance dance event curator and educator for independent and institutional projects between Italy and the UK. She is co-founder of the nomadic screendance platform [SET.mefree] Dance & Movement on Screen and the Italian cultural association V.e.N.e. In 2020 she researched the Italian dance scene during the pandemic, out in her last publication ‘As the words are touching us. Reconsidering some No Manifestos in the light of the present pandemic’ (Dune Journal Vol. 1 n. 2, 2020). Elisa is a PhD candidate in Dance Studies (Roehampton University, London) and she is currently based in Berlin. https://elisafrasson.weebly.com/
Marisa C. Hayes is a Franco-American artist, scholar and curator working at the crossroads of moving images and the performing arts. Much of her work focuses on explorations of screendance, particularly with regards to its pedagogy and curation. She is the founding co-director of the Festival International de Vidéo Danse de Bourgogne in France, an annual platform that is currently preparing its 13th edition. She also curates screendance for the National Choreographic Development Center in Paris and Theatre Freiburg in Germany. She teaches screendance practice, theory and history in higher education internationally, as well as for various public outreach organizations. Her screendance publications include the book The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies (ed. Douglas Rosenberg), The International Journal of Screendance, and the book Art in Motion: Current Research in Screendance, which she co-edited for Cambridge Scholars. Her own screendance films have won the Susan Braun Award (New York Dance Films Association) and Pentacle Movement Media’s summer video dance prize.
Marco Longo is an Italian filmmaker, independent producer, film critic and programmer, based in Milan. Graduated in Film Directing (Civica Scuola di Cinema Luchino Visconti, Milan) with a background in Literature (Università degli Studi, Pavia), in 2018 he co-founded the production company Berenice Film, which focuses on documentary and audiovisual design. Co-founder — with Alessandra Elettra Badoino, Marina Giardina and Fabio Poggi — of Augenblick Associazione Culturale, a video dance collective based in Genoa. Augenblick curates Stories We Dance, the video dance section of FuoriFormato Festival, in Genoa. He collaborates with the Italian online film magazine Filmidee and with the Locarno Film Festival.
Ariadne Mikou is a Greek-born artist-researcher currently residing in Italy. She holds a PhD degree in Interdisciplinary Choreographic Research that was fully funded by the University of Roehampton (UK). With a background as an architect, dance performer and choreographer, her practice is located at the crossover between corporeal, spatial and screen-based arts. She is co-founder of the nomadic micro-festival [SET.mefree] Dance & Movement on Screen, a platform focused on screendance curation, education and mentoring. Her writings have been published in a broad range of peer-reviewed international journals and book anthologies. She is currently collaborating as an Editor for Dance with the global theatre portal The Theatre Times, she is a Fellow Artist for Creative Europe’s Migrating Artists Project-Challenging Dance and Cinema across Europe (mAPs) and a Research Assistant at Memory in Motion. Re-membering Dance History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.
Katja Vaghi is an independent researcher based in Berlin, Germany. She obtained her PhD in dance philosophy from the University of Roehampton (UK) and is currently a visiting lecturer at several universities and conservatories in the UK and in Germany. Her most recent publications include entries on Sasha Waltz for the newest edition of Fifty Contemporary Choreographers (2021) and on Jirí Kylián for The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet. Her research interests encompass referencing in dance, intermediality, the comic, screendance, and somatic approaches to space.
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.