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Moderator bio:
Alexandra Harlig (https://alexandraharlig.com/) is an Assistant Clinical Professor at University of Maryland in the University Honors ‘Virtually Human’ thematic cluster. She holds a PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University. Her research focuses on popular dance forms in media: the political and economic analysis of their production, circulation, and reception, the movement cultures captured, and the platforms utilized. Her multi-disciplinary dissertation Social Texts, Social Audiences, Social Worlds: The Circulation of Popular Dance on YouTube (2019) is available to read and has been downloaded almost 8,000 times. Her writing has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Dance on the Popular Screen and The International Journal of Screendance, for which she is co-editing the special issue This Is Where We Dance Now: COVID-19 and the New and Next in Dance Onscreen with Harmony Bench. Find her on the internet @ReadyMadeAl
Presenter bios:
A/Prof Crystal Abidin is an anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, especially internet celebrity, influencer cultures, and social media pop cultures in the Asia Pacific region. She has published over 60 articles/chapters, and her books include Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (2018, Emerald), Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame (co-edited with Megan Lindsay Brown, 2018, Emerald), Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (co-authored with Tama Leaver & Tim Highfield, 2020, Polity), and Mediated Interfaces: The Body on Social Media (co-edited with Katie Warfield and Carolina Cambre, 2020, Bloomsbury). Her newest book is tumblr (co-authored with Katrin Tiidenberg & Natalie Ann Hendry, 2021, Polity), with forthcoming books focused on Influencer cultures, Blogshop histories, and TikTok youth movements. Crystal works closely with industry, and her internationally acclaimed research has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia, Pacific Standard Top 30 Thinkers Under 30, and the ABC Top 5 Humanities Fellowship. She is Principal Research Fellow and ARC DECRA Fellow in Internet Studies, and Programme Lead of Social Media Pop Cultures at CCAT, Curtin University. Reach her at wishcrys.com
Trevor Boffone is a Lecturer in the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Houston and a teacher at Bellaire High School. His work using Dubsmash and TikTok with his students has been featured on Good Morning America, ABC News, Inside Edition, and Access Hollywood, among numerous national and local media platforms. He is the author of Renegades: Digital Dance Cultures from Dubsmash to TikTok (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is the co-editor of Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theater (Northwestern University Press, 2019); Nerds, Goths, Geeks, and Freaks: Outsiders in Chicanx and Latinx Young Adult Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2020); and Shakespeare and Latinidad (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). His current book project, TikTok Broadway: Musical Theatre Fandom in the Digital Age, explores the relationship between Broadway musicals and the social media app TikTok to demonstrate how the app has democratized fan practices and spaces.
Kelly Bowker is a Ph.D. candidate in Critical Dance Studies at the University of California, Riverside where she has received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellowship, Gluck Fellowship, Digital Humanities Fellowship, and Dissertation Year Program Fellowship. Her research uses critical race studies to examine the way that technology is represented and utilized in both popular and concert dance. Her interdisciplinary research addresses the relationship between identity and how individuals experience and engage with technologies, considering both the active construction of images and the role of representation. She has presented her research at Dance Studies Association as well as the Popular Culture Association.
Colette Eloi is a sought after guest lecturer and dance facilitator, in African Diaspora Dance. Colette is a third year student at UC Riverside in the Critical Dance Studies Ph.D. program. She earned her B.A. in Development Studies, with an International Relations focus, from UC Berkeley, and an M.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies Creative Inquiry, from The California Institute Of Integral Studies, focusing on oral tradition and dance. Her dance home is the dance rich Oakland Bay Area, where she established herself as a culture worker and an award-winning dancer/commissioned choreographer and director of ELWAH Movement. She is a master instructor of Haitian Dance technique and context, which gounds her research interest which are the Pre-colonial Archives of African Rooted dance culture. Her research methodology is dialogical elevating knowledge bases of cultural communities globally and bridging those discourses to the academy. Ms. Eloi is one of the creators of the online dance conference series entitled: Back to the Root: The Healing and Spiritual Power of the Spine and the Pelvis in African Diaspora Dance, which will be presenting its 8th in the series which started at the beginning of Covid.
Chuyun Oh (Ph.D. in Performance Studies, UT Austin coh@sdsu.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Dance Practice/Theory at San Diego State University. Before pursuing her Ph.D., she was a professional ballet and modern dancer performing across Japan, Korea, Austria, Germany, and the U.S. As a Fulbright scholar, she focuses on performance ethnography and racial and gender identities in transnational popular dance on social media. Her work has appeared in Dance Research Journal; Dance Chronicle; The Journal of Popular Culture; Journal of Intercultural Communication Research; Communication, Culture & Critique; The International Journal of the History of Sport; The Journal of Fandom Studies, and Text and Performance Quarterly. Since 2016, her works have received three Top Contributed Performance awards and a Top Paper award from the Performance Studies Division at the National Communication Association. She is serving on the Editorial Board of Text and Performance Quarterly and Review of Communication.
Pamela Krayenbuhl is an Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies in the Culture, Arts, and Communication division at the University of Washington Tacoma. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University. As a media historian, she researches the long and ever-changing relationship between dance and moving images, with a focus on the aesthetics and politics of dancing bodies in film, television, and new media. Pamela has presented her work at the Dance Studies Association, the International Screen Studies Conference, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. She is currently working on a monograph about the performance of race and/as masculinity by male dance stars in U.S. midcentury film and television. Beyond academia, as a contemporary ballet dancer and choreographer, Pamela co-founded Modet Dance Collective in Chicago in 2013. She also catalogued the 500+ films of the Ruth Page Collection at the Chicago Film Archives.
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. An edited version of this roundtable will appear 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.