Dance Studies Association

We need more dance studies scholars because dance shapes our understanding of people, politics, and culture throughout time.

Join DSA this week as we participate in 's campaign. The message is simple and proactive: we need more humanities and social sciences scholars and research.

Sound off in the comments! Why do we need more dance studies scholars?

DSA is accepting nominations for our annual awards, which honor the year's outstanding books & publications, leadership & service, and graduate student work, as well as offering conference travel support for contingent and independent scholars. The DSA awards contribute not only to the visibility of the individuals and works honored, but also to the visibility of dance research and to our continuing drive for excellence in dance scholarship. All awardees will be honored at our 2026 Annual Conference, Speculative Choreographies, to be held at California State University, Long Beach on October 23-25. See a full list of our available awards below and learn more on DSA's website.

Nominations will be accepted through March 31st. Learn more: https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/awards

Reach out to DSA VP of Awards, Melissa Melpignano at [email protected] with any questions.

Submit to the Dance Research Journal Special Issue: Early Twentieth-Century Dance Photography: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Approaches

This special issue for Dance Research Journal will bring together 5-6 articles from scholars in Dance Studies, Visual Studies, and beyond, to explore the transnational and transdisciplinary aspects of dance photography, considering how innovations in photography helped document global life in the early twentieth century. Dance photography functions as a primary and portable archive of dance performances in the period. It also sheds light on the importance of corporeal movement and performance to experiments with technological developments in photography as well as photography’s ongoing, often self-conscious, development into a form of art. At the same time, dance itself was developing under the impact of the new documentary possibilities of photography, especially as advances in technology opened new ways of capturing, and thus seeing, movement. Thus, while photography is often associated with stillness, dance photography complicates the multiplicitous relationships between stillness, movement, and performance. Dance photography in the period also importantly contributed to the (self-)exploration of q***r, racial and ethnic identities, providing a window into an oft-neglected part of early twentieth-century (global) history. Dance photography in the West contributed to the exoticization of non-White bodies, for example as part of popular forms of ethnography in magazines. The productiveness of a transnational approach is further suggested by the advances in portability of both camera and photograph through the first half of the 20th century and the role this mobility of photography played as part of the increased movement of people across national borders.

Submission Deadline Extended to March 1!

Read the full Call for Papers: https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/dance-research-journal

This crip arts workshop merges dance improvisation and poetic writing while centering disabled and chronically ill bodyminds. Our workshop is based on artistic research from Cynthia Ling Lee’s and Krista Miranda’s Call and Response, an interdisciplinary project at the crossroads of dance, poetry, audio description, and sound art created in collaboration with disabled composers Jay Afrisando and alexa dexa. During this embodied workshop, we will guide you through some of our movement scores and give you a taste of our creative process: witnessing each other will lead to collaborative creative writing that integrates poetry with dance. Participants should bring something to write with and be prepared to move within their capacities. Workshop will include auditive guidance and visual witnessing.

Date & Time: Friday, February 13th, 2026 | 2:30-4pm Central

This event is hosted by the Crip Moves Working Group and is free to members.

Register online: https://bit.ly/CripMoves

ID 1: On a gradient of purple to white, dark purple text reads "Call and Response: A Workshop on Poetic Dance Scores for Crip Bodyminds with Cynthia Ling Lee and Krista Miranda hosted by the Crip Moves Working Group Friday, February 13, 2026 2:30-4pm CT via zoom Register at: dancestudiesassociation.org"
ID 2: A screenshot of one of our Zoom rehearsals, featuring a dance duet on a bed between Krista and her golden retriever, Zuppa. Krista, a white fat crip woman with tattoos, sits perched on the edge of a bed, toes curled up and leg muscles activated, hands suspended in floating motion, while Zuppa nestles between her legs, chin resting cozily on her thigh. Cynthia, a Taiwanese person, watches from a tiny Zoom window in the corner, head cocked in interest.

Good news! In response to several requests, we're extending the conference submission deadline to next Monday, February 16.

Speculative Choreographies will take place at California State University, Long Beach on October 23-25.

This conference explores how dance speculates—how it reflects, resists, and reimagines—the forces that shape our contemporary world. These forces include migration and memory as well as media, markets, and the social choreography of bodies across borders, platforms, and stages. The conference site rests on what was originally the Tongva village of Puvungna, meaning "gathering place," a site featured in the Tongva/Gabrieleno/Acjachemen peoples' creation stories and stories of emergence. With its indigenous populations, diverse diasporic communities, deep histories of resistance, and global entertainment industries, Los Angeles and the conference location offer fertile ground for rethinking how dance is entangled with questions of value, visibility, and survival.

In this post-truth moment, and in a region forged by spectacle, migration, media, labor, and ecological extremes, the 2026 DSA conference asks: How do bodies move through—with and against—systems of control, extraction, discipline, and erasure? What possibilities emerge when we imagine movement as an affirmative form of world-making? Learn more about the conference, read the full call for papers, and submit your abstract on DSA's website.

Submit your abstract today: https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

Just under one week left to get your abstracts and proposals in for our 2026 conference, taking place at California State University, Long Beach October 23-25.

Get your proposals in today at the link below or reach out to Membership & Conference Manager Maggie Bridger at [email protected] with any questions.

Submit now: https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

Rounding out our spotlights of the fantastic HUBs on offer at this year's conference is "What Now, What Next: Screendance and Popular Culture." Convened by the Popular, Social, and Vernacular Dance Working Group, this HUB, taking place at our 2026 conference, invites screendance makers, educators, theorists, and scholars to critically examine the intersections of social, popular, and vernacular dance with contemporary screen practices.

Learn more and submit your abstract today: https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

Social, popular, and vernacular dances have been integral to screendance since its inception. Many pioneering figures—Busby Berkeley, Gene Kelly, Maya Deren—worked extensively with these forms. Yet, after Deren’s seminal A Study in Choreography for the Camera (1945), the experimental art branch of screendance largely centered on modern, postmodern, contemporary, and ballet traditions. As screendance has expanded dramatically in the past decade—fueled by visual culture and the proliferation of screendance festivals worldwide—social and popular dances remain underrepresented in these curated spaces.

Meanwhile, popular dance thrives on social media, where short-form vertical video dominates global screens. This shift raises urgent questions: What unique challenges and creative possibilities arise when adapting social and popular forms to screendance? How does the aesthetics of vertical video reshape our understanding of cinematic dance? In what ways have efforts toward diversity—across race, gender, age, and ability—reconfigured the field? And how do funding structures and the influx of high-budget productions influence innovation and access? How do spectatorship and spectacle mediate speculation about the labor behind these productions, including what is seen, what remains invisible, and what is imagined?

HUB Facilitators: , , , .elizabethjunebergman

ID: Two parallel filmstrips showcase a selection of frames from screen dances featuring social, popular, and vernacular forms. Medium shots and close-ups capture multiple bodies in motion.

The February 10 submission deadline is getting closer! Submit your abstract for this incredible HUB today. Organized by our Mexican Folklórico Dance across Borders Exploratory Working Group, "Folklórico Dance across Borders: Between Spectacle, Movement, and Embodied Histories" invites scholars and practitioners to analyze the power dynamics at play in the performances of folklórico.

Learn more and submit your proposal now: https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

Mexican regional and traditional dance—known today as folklórico—constitutes a shared embodied language of transnational mexicanidad (Mexicanness), forming cultural exchange circuits between communities across the U.S.-Mexico border. As one of the primary expressive modes of mexicanidad, folklórico offers an invaluable window into the promises, conflicts, frictions, and failures of this contested ideation and the contingent attachments to Greater Mexico that it enables. Operating as a signifying paradigm for negotiating ethnically and racially marked belonging, folklórico functions as a complex site of global modernity and world-making practice, despite its exclusion by academia.

The Mexican Folklórico Dance across Borders Working Group invites scholars and practitioners to analyze the power dynamics at play in the performances of folklórico, addressing questions of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, citizenship, ability, indigeneity, and Asian- and Afro-diasporic expressions. Foregrounding intersectional and transdisciplinary approaches, including practice and community-engaged research, papers should tend to the affective, political, material, and corporeal forms that folklórico enacts through choreographies of resistance, belonging, and social justice in Mexico, the United States, and across borders.

Learn more and follow along

HUB Facilitators: &

ID: A group of dancers turning around their colorful skirts during a performance of Nepantla. Credit: Roxanne Gray

Have you submitted your proposal for our 2026 conference, Speculative Choreographies? Consider submitting to this HUB organized by our Dancing the Long Nineteenth Century Working Group, tilted "The Nineteenth Century Lens: Seeing Dance."

Learn more and submit your abstract today: https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

Drawing on the root, “spect” (meaning “to look”) of “speculative” and “spectacular,” the Dancing the Long Nineteenth Century Working Group invites engagement with questions around the evolution of looking during the nineteenth century. A period of rapidly changing technologies and the proliferation of mass culture, the nineteenth century also saw numerous social shifts, which impacted cultures of performance and spectatorship. These changes made observation of bodily presentation and difference critical to social, aesthetic, and political spheres. One well-documented aspect of this period is the expanded role of what we would now call dance criticism; in both Europe and the U.S., discursive accounts of theatrical dancing proliferated, as did visual documentation via lithography and cartooning. Yet none of these forms of documenting were transparent or even translucent, but rather they all revealed social, political, scientific, technological, moral, or critical lenses by which dances were viewed and interpreted. At the same time, attempts to depict dance outside the theaters proliferated as well, to various ends. For example, regional social dances were documented in France, for fear that without inscription, they might disappear; meanwhile, in Philadelphia, Black upper-class balls, after attracting derogatory commentary in the press, went underground.

HUB Facilitators: Lynn Matluck Brooks, Gara Gargano, Madison Mainwaring, and Olivia Sabee

ID: Caricature of Lola Montez, in first arabesque, viewed from upstage; the house manager, behind a piece of scenery, has a contract in his pocket stating Manager agreement half the house; the only two spectators--one in a stage box, the other in the front row--ogle the dancer.

Our next 2026 HUB spotlight for our upcoming conference comes from our Chair Network Working Group. This HUB, "Speculative Leadership: Chairing/Coordinating Dance Programs in 21st Century Higher Education" offers opportunities for those chairing, coordinating, advising, or holding leadership to gather around the particular challenges of this moment in higher education.

Learn more and submit today: https://dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

People chairing, coordinating, advising, or holding leadership positions in dance programs face a multitude of challenges. Various factors shape decision making such as enrollment management, operational budgets, administrative pressures, resource allocation, student demands, etc. These positions often come with little compensation or release time, though many of us step into these roles to create possibility within dysfunctional/antiquated systems that value product over process. We often have to advocate and answer the question to both students and upper administration: what is the ROI of a dance degree with the escalating costs of higher education in the 21st century?

This hub will convene three panels consisting of four to five 10 minute micro-papers followed by a group discussion on the overall theme/topic each day. Please submit a micro-paper topic on a panel topic you would like to present on. These abstracts do not have to have the “answers” but can also pose a question, scenario, or challenge that you face in dance leadership.

Submit your proposal now: https://dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

HUB Facilitator:

ID: A single white plastic chair sits in an otherwise empty, dimly lit room. A strong beam of light from the left casts sharp shadows on the floor and wall, emphasizing the chair's contours and the starkness of the space. The background fades into darkness on the right side, creating a dramatic, contemplative atmosphere. The overall mood suggests reflection, anticipation, or absence, aligning with themes of leadership and responsibility

We continue our spotlights of the HUBs taking place at our 2026 conference with "Tropicar: Choreographies of Peripheral Intensities" convened by the Practice-as-Research Working Group. Submissions open through Feb 10 for this and our other exciting presenting opportunities.

Submit today to Speculative Choreographies: https://dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

This Hub proposes tropicar as both a concept and a practice: a corporeal strategy emerging from Brazilian Tropicalism (Tropicália) (Oiticica 1967) rearticulated in the frame of contemporary dance research as a mode of moving through contradiction, excess, and colonial entanglement. The term refers dubiously to a stumble, to become tropical, but we imply it as a specific quality, moreover, as a modality of moving with the environment.

The HUB, proposed by the Practice-as-Research working group, will function as an experimental laboratory where dance operates not as representation of the tropics, but as a practice emerging from its contradictions. We will combine somatic practices with readings from Latin American countercolonial theory, performance studies, and Tropicalist aesthetics. We welcome participants from diverse contexts interested in postcolonial dance studies, Global South epistemologies, and experimental choreographic practices.

Read the full HUB description and submit today: https://dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

HUB facilitated by: members Bianca Scliar, , , María Regina Firmino-Castillo, Erika Villeroy da Costa &

ID: Unfinished and often intersecting lines of black chalk on bone colored paper drawn by dancers in the choreographic work, Routing (2025), by Sanchita Sharma.

Today's HUB spotlight comes from our Dance & Technology working group! Submissions open now through February 10 for our 2026 conference. Consider submitting to this HUB entitled, "Dance & Digital Culture: How technology and our digital lives affect the ways we create, watch, and share dance."

Submit today: https://dancestudiesassociation.org/speculative-choreographies

The Dance & Technology Working Group invites proposals for participation in a hybrid discussion and movement HUB exploring how digital culture shapes the contemporary field of dance. This HUB will investigate how our creative processes, viewing habits, and modes of sharing work are increasingly framed by digital tools, online environments, and evolving technological ethics. Together, we will examine questions at the intersection of embodiment and emerging technologies, including how social media aesthetics shift movement choices; how looping and remix culture inform choreographic thinking; how multi-window attention changes perception; and how our bodies respond to digital overload, fragmentation, and constant connectivity.

Participants will engage in both conversation and physical exploration. Movement-based proposals may include improvisations inspired by digital metaphors (scrolling, buffering, lag, swiping, filtering, AI-generated prompt chains), visual mapping, small-group tasks, and dramaturgical frameworks that participants can apply to their own artistic or scholarly work. Discussions should address ethical questions: What does authorship mean in an era of AI-assisted creation? Who owns the digital traces of our movement? How do we maintain bodily autonomy in a world of surveillance technologies? What human values must we protect as technology expands?

HUB facilitators: & .fishel

ID: Two Drexel University dance students wear black motion capture suits and stand in front of the projection of a large computer screen showing their digital avatars dancing. Credit to .fishel