We write this work as a feminist collective of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as a faculty member at the University of Utah. Based in the School of Dance, we draw upon the interdisciplinary creative practice of screendance as an emerging research methodology to remediate (dance) archives through a feminist lens. As both students and teachers of these classes, we first came together through the diverse course offerings of the dance program: Screendance I and Critical Dance Histories II. In these classes, we focused on Chicana/Latina feminist research methodologies, utilizing digital technologies and archival remediation.
In the Screendance course, we engaged deeply with both theoretical and practical aspects of the art form. Our collaborative exploration of screendance covered various topics, including the dynamic relationship between the viewer and the performance, effective filming techniques for dance, and the concept of editing as a form of choreography.[1] We also examined kinesthetic empathy, the gaze, site-specific dance for the camera, and the politics surrounding representation in dance, particularly concerning disability on screen. Furthermore, we discussed the broader implications of filmmaking for dance artists, touching on ethnographic, archival, and pedagogical dimensions. Our class served as a platform for critical conversations about our readings and viewings, fostering an environment for giving and receiving thoughtful feedback on works in progress. Students were encouraged to cultivate their own voice and identity within this interdisciplinary art form, placing a strong emphasis on collaboration and process-oriented work.
In the Critical Dance Histories II course, we explored dance history and historiography from a fronteriza-borderland perspective, aiming to understand the interplay of power in knowledge production and the dissemination of histories. Our discussions examined the geopolitical impacts of the evolving U.S./Mexico border over centuries of colonization, along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s[2] concept of “big B” Borderlands, which describes both the metaphorical borders within us and the spaces we encounter or terrains we cross—psychic, social, and cultural—that we navigate through our life experiences. Through this lens, students delved into the emergence of dance within various historical contexts, examining topics including dance in/and the borderlands, conceptions of “American” dance, transnational dance modernisms, feminist cartographies of the (dancing) Chicano Movement, and dance histories of the everyday. Our approach involved integrating movement into our history lectures, allowing us to engage with the danced musical forms we were studying physically. Additionally, we developed data collection and digital mapping skills that harnessed community knowledge and lived experiences through cartographic strategies, such as GeoTestimonio and SIGuache.[3]
One significant theme across both courses was the acknowledgment of how the colonial project has contributed to the disconnection of body, mind, and spirit. When the body is silenced or marginalized, essential embodied knowledge is often overlooked. Reprioritizing the body as equal and interconnected with the bodymindspirit[4] and embracing the embodied practice of plática as both a Chicana/Latina feminist pedagogy and research methodology in the classroom and dance studio, work to address such negation.[5] Through the embodied practices of plática and dancemaking, we cultivated agency in our learning—both in the archives and the dance studio—enabling the exercise of cultural intuition[6] and the theorization of the flesh[7] to take center stage in processing new information. This expression played a crucial role in deconstructing historical narratives while also facilitating creative acts of resistance against dominant historiographies. Consequently, we focused on embodied knowledge as fundamental to our exploration of dance archives and the interpretation of historical materials while engaging with digital technologies.
While Kiri was the instructor for both courses, Alexia was a graduate student in the Screendance course, and Sophie was an undergraduate student in the Critical Dance Histories II course. In each of these courses, Kiri presented her research on using artmaking and plática as an interdependent research methodology[8] to disrupt archival silences and erasures of the Latinx/e contributions to American modern dance.
Students were then encouraged to apply this methodology to archival remediation in their own class assignments and explorations. Kiri believed this was a crucial pedagogical strategy for both Screendance and Critical Dance Histories courses. As Tresa Randall suggests, “by interacting directly with primary sources […students] often realize how central interpretation is to the historiographic process”[9]—prioritizing this interaction through the body, specifically plática and dancemaking through screendance, allowed for feminist perspectives to emerge, building out the historical dance narratives that each student independently investigated.
In the Screendance course, Alexia developed a seed project by visiting the archives of the Greek community in Salt Lake City and created a dance film. In the following semester’s Dance Histories course, she presented her screendance on the Greek archives to the undergraduate class, which Sophie was a student of. For her final project in this Dance Histories course, Sophie explored the archives of dance educator Virginia Tanner to gain a deeper understanding of her own place within dance history, as she had trained at the Tanner School during her childhood. Both screendances explored aspects of (un)belonging and made visible women’s contributions to history. Sophie’s work focuses on a place that shaped her as a young dancer, while Alexia’s work explores a new community connected to her cultural roots and personal migration. The two projects further overlap as Alexia and Sophie attempt to narrate each prospective history through their bodies, employing embodied and site-specific practices.
Based on our experiences from these overlapping class processes, we have critically reflected on the meaningful relationship between screendance, feminist futures, digital engagement, and archival remediation. In the following sections, Alexia and Sophie share their work through written reflections and work samples, further illustrating the possibilities of screendance in creating digital feminist futures through critical archival interventions.
Moving Roots
Alexia’s Autoethnographic Reflection
Moving Roots is a screendance filmed in Salt Lake City, Utah, exploring the history of the city’s Greek community through an embodied, feminist lens. While the heritage of this community has largely been preserved and narrated through the male leadership of the Orthodox Church, this piece reimagines that history from a female perspective – my own, as a Greek woman who has relocated to Salt Lake City.
A dancing body appears in different locations in the city, yet it is only fully revealed in the end. The camera focuses on the feet—connecting with dirt, leaves, and grass—emphasizing the relationship between movement, land, and memory. Each stomp and jump is a ritual act intended to awaken the memory of those left behind or lost to time.
The dance featured is called Pentozalis, a traditional Cretan dance typically performed by men. This choice was critical and intentional. Most of the Greek immigrants to Utah came from Crete, and by performing a male dance with a female body, I make a purposeful intervention in how history is embodied and retold. It becomes a reclamation, a woman’s voice entering a narrative where it has long been sidelined.
The film also weaves in archival materials from the Hellenic Cultural Museum, personal heirlooms such as photographs and postcards (courtesy of Marina Giannoulis), and footage from Mount Olivet Cemetery. The body’s movement with the music and the female narration contrasts with the archives that show how men brought women from Greece to Utah to become their wives and establish a new life. Images from the Cretan Glenti (feast) organized by the Greek community appear in the video. There, the women’s dancing bodies appear almost like ghosts; their movements overlap the men’s through a choreographic edit that superimposes the images and conjures multiple histories simultaneously. With this critical editing intervention, my goal is to symbolize women’s constant presence and story, even if it is not told as often as men’s.
This process and the result of a screendance have allowed me to sew together my personal story with archival materials and compare my experience of moving away from my country to other migration narratives. Embodying and then visualizing these pieces together was a unique experience because I realized that, despite the distance between eras, the emotional resonance of leaving one’s homeland and trying to preserve cultural identity remains strikingly similar. The process revealed how deeply physical movement can carry memory. The same single stomps or jumps that I have always seen people performing are now claimed by a female body, and that allows me to connect to past and future generations. Still, the attempt to keep alive a culture so far away from its origins creates a unique sense of belonging among people. It became clear to me that the dancing body can serve as both witness and storyteller, reclaiming space in historical narratives where women’s voices have long been absent.
Roots & Wings: An Embodied History
Sophie’s Autoethnographic Reflection
For decades, the Salt Lake Valley has housed an abundant creative art and dance community. Professional companies and studios have flourished with incredible support and encouragement from artists and educators around the state of Utah. One of those trailblazers, Virginia Tanner, became a foundational educational leader in the dance field not only in Utah but across the United States. Her focus on children and how to nurture not only their dance, but human development made her a household name in the dance, art, and educational community across Utah.
Virginia Tanner grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, during the early 20th century. She was incredibly active throughout her early childhood, which incentivized her parents to put her in ballet classes at an early age. She quickly felt limited by the technique and her teachers, remembering unsettling memories of her early ballet classes and the physical demands that didn’t fit her young body. She said that “it wasn’t the way she wanted to dance. It was too structured.”[10] Her first positive encounter with a dance class was in Blanche Mawson Rigby’s tap class in the summer of 1930. She recounted that Rigby “was the first person to give [her] personal encouragement. She made [her] feel [she] was a human being with worth.”[11]
As Tanner developed her own pedagogical approach, she used the influence of the dancers and teachers of her past, such as Rigby, Doris Humphrey, and Evelyn Davis. She focused on the importance of “developmentally sound and age-appropriate modern dance technique for young people.”[12] She developed movement practices and pedagogical theories that reflected her desire to support and strengthen every dancer that entered her studio. Her theories were strongly rooted in her own experiences and all of the voices that influenced her own dancing experience. The studio she developed enriches hundreds of students, six months to 70 and is still actively growing to this day.
As I completed my research on Tanner’s legacy, I found myself with the wonderful opportunity to reflect on my own place within her story. I danced at Virginia Tanner’s revolutionary studio from age five to eighteen, and in the last year, I began my own teaching career at her studio. For my research, I took the opportunity to explore not only Tanner’s history but my own. Before my time dancing at Tanner Dance, my parents placed me in multiple different dance environments for me to explore as a young, blossoming dancer. Not a single one seemed to fit me and my young, creative, dancing soul. My parents, like Tanner’s, sought out a creative environment that could meet me where I was developmentally and creatively, leading them to Tanner Dance. As I explored Tanner’s history and found that, like me, Tanner’s early dance training did not fit the creative soul that she was, I found a great love for my own history and how directly it was shaped by Tanner. I found many stories from Tanner’s dancing childhood to closely follow my own, crafting both our creative and educational thoughts and theories as dancers, teachers, and students.
As I returned to Tanner’s dancing history, I explored space and movement to deepen my understanding of such an underappreciated educator and mover. I found that as an educator focusing on the training of young dancing bodies, Tanner is frequently excluded from conversations about dance history, which often prioritize performance over pedagogy. These findings guided me as I sought to honor her life and legacy as a dancer and teacher. By utilizing an incredibly in-depth digital archive of Tanner’s legacy, I was able to physically reflect on Tanner’s history and its effect on my own dancing body. Her archive contained documentary and performance footage, as well as interviews with Tanner Dance dancers and teachers. As I worked through her archive, I pondered how my own digital archives could act in conversation with her own. I found the communication of these two archives to profoundly reflect so many of the pedagogical theories and practices that Tanner developed and shared throughout her studio and beyond. Through this embodied study of her life and legacy, I was able to more fully reflect on her impact on me as a dancer, student, and, now, as a teacher in her studio.
In order to film my screendance, I returned to a number of the studio and performance spaces I was fortunate enough to grow up in, and found a new appreciation for my own dance education and the person it taught me to be. That appreciation for my dancing past gave me new insight into my impact and ability as a teacher of young dancing bodies at Tanner’s studio, finding new resources and thoughts on how to approach teaching with a focus on enriching the bodies and brains of young artists in her space. Tanner’s research and artistic voice can be found echoing in the halls of Tanner Dance still to this day. As a dancer and teacher, I look forward to continuing that echoing voice, enriching the dancing bodies of the students at Tanner Dance, continuing Virginia’s legacy, and growing my own.
Feminist Futures Moving Us Forward: What We Have Found, What We Envision
Through our individual and collective efforts to utilize a feminist perspective in archival remediation through screendance, we have found:
- An interdisciplinary mode, such as screendance, allows us to sense, see, feel, and think more profoundly. It provides us with multiple entry points to the archives and conjures up renewed stories and storylines.
- The “product” (the screendance film) becomes a digital medium that can be circulated more widely, accessibly, and readily, making (dancing) histories visible to a larger population.
- Following Bench and Elswitt’s[13] line of thinking, working through archival materials in this manner enables us to draw theories and ideas directly from the material, thereby making new scholarly connections and raising different inquiries.
The possibilities we envision for digital feminist futures include not only how we have integrated this work and participated in these practices in undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Utah’s School of Dance, but also how we plan to incorporate it into our work beyond this department and across the differences and divides that academia often reifies.
For example, Kiri teaches screendance in the summers at Ballet Hispánico in New York City. A grassroots organization founded by Tina Ramirez in 1970, at the height of the Chicano Movement, Ballet Hispánico performs, trains, educates, and inspires the Latinx/e community both locally in the NYC boroughs and through national and international touring engagements. Teaching screendance to young women at the summer programs in the School of Dance for emerging professionals enables Kiri to bring archival work and dance histories into the studio, bridging the divides between community dance practices and institutions of higher learning. While academic sites, such as the University of Utah, may be better equipped (and funded) to engage in this archival work, Kiri has found that screendance through a Chicana feminist lens enables the very crossing of these boundaries (between dance studios and grassroots organizations versus ivory towers) to consider how dance artists can capture and storytell dance histories of their own. She is working to understand its potential to further circulate knowledge through these technologies and to build out dance history narratives from the perspectives of dance artists outside of academic spaces. Moreover, engaging in pláticas alongside dancemaking practices becomes a new site for exploration and theorization in studio practice, which invites dancers to bring their perspectives as co-constructors of knowledge and artmaking to the screen.
Another example is Alexia’s screendance, filmed in Salt Lake City, which centers on the city’s Greek demographic. This has allowed her to not only further the feminist message and bring attention to the women’s (absent) voices/perspectives of the local Greek archives in Salt Lake City, Utah, but also provided a way for her to both contribute and learn from the local Greek community. This project became not only a way to challenge existing narratives but also a means of reconnecting to her own heritage, lineage, and identity in the diaspora. Alexia contributes to an evolving dialogue about how cultural memory is formed and retold by engaging with community members, archival materials, and embodied performance practices that resonate with plática as a feminist methodology rooted in dialogue, storytelling, and relational knowledge-making. Her work suggests how screendance can function as a critical pedagogical tool, bringing embodied research and feminist herstoriography into classrooms, community centers, and public discourse.
By dancing through her own past, Sophie brings her own lens of interpretation to the intimate archives of Virginia Tanner’s legacy. Revisiting significant spaces in her own dancing history deepened Sophie’s own appreciation and understanding of Tanner’s contributions to the field of dance and its impact on communities around Utah and the United States. Utilizing nuanced film and literary archives of Tanner’s own history and legacy gave Sophie the space and voice to not only honor Tanner’s legacy but reflect on her own. By developing a new understanding and appreciation of the mission and purpose of Tanner’s own research gave Sophie a new motivation to strengthen her own research in supporting the development of students as dancers and humans. Going forward, Sophie hopes to utilize the inspiration of Tanner as she develops her own pedagogical theories and approach. She plans to continue her research in Tanner’s legacy as a scholar and teacher to support many generations to come. Engaging with Tanner’s legacy through a digital platform contextualized Tanner’s past through a new perspective, pushing her research forward. As an emerging scholar-activist, Sophie hopes to give space to an underrepresented educator and trailblazer while exploring the relevant and engaging medium of screendance.
We have found that the digital storytelling potential of screendance offers a vital space for feminist perspectives to creatively engage archives and expand historical narratives that often omit women’s voices. We recognize the importance and urgency of this practice as both a form of GeoTestimonio and digital testimonio.[14] In both films, women’s voices, conveyed through personal stories, are intertwined with place, linking the individual to a broader collective narrative of struggle and belonging. These embodied digital testimonios invite viewers to acknowledge and witness experiences that are at once personal and historical. By adopting these methods, we aim to construct a more inclusive narrative that honors those often overlooked by traditional archival practices.
In her work on medicinal, healing approaches to doing history, Aurora Levins Morales asks: “If women are assumed to be the most important people in this story, how will that change the questions we ask? How will it change our view of what events and processes are most important? How will it change the answers to questions that have already been asked and supposedly answered?”[15] Taking this call to heart, we rely on the embodied practice of screendance to raise such critical questions and imagine feminist futures that give more young women’s voices a platform, where both personal and collective histories are documented, celebrated, and critically examined.
This digital art medium also fosters a space for histories to be (re)examined and (re)told beyond the written text. By prioritizing the body and artmaking, we respond to Diana Taylor’s call, urging us to focus on “embodied practices that distill meaning from past events, store them, and find embodied modalities to express [history] in the here-and-now, yet with an eye to the future.”[16] Taylor advocates for a reconsideration of how performance and historical studies “transmit knowledge about the past in ways that allow us to understand and use it” to illuminate “that disciplinary blind spot that history cannot reach on its own.”[17] Retelling histories through the body (in our case, dance) and employing an embodied methodology to do so (in our case, screendance) counters the fact that “the presence of bodies and their practices in history has been mostly erased by Western methods of historiography.”[18] Our bodies intervene and reclaim that part of history through a feminist perspective, which we believe can energize a feminist youth movement to take further action and reclaim our silenced histories.
Notes
[1] Karen Pearlman, Cutting Rhythms: Intuitive Film Editing, 2nd ed. (New York: Focal Press, 2016).
[2] Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books. San Francisco, 1987).
[3] Sylvia Fernández & Gris Muñoz discuss GeoTestimonio as a digital storytelling medium that prioritizes the lived experiences of women living in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. To read more about their work, see Victoria Rossi, “Cross-Border Storytelling Project Aims to Put Women’s Memories on the Map,” El Paso Matters, Aug. 18, 2021. Regarding SIGuache, Fernández et al. (2024) model the potential of repurposing a colonial tool to map the affects that space holds from the perspective of community knowledge, such as dichos (sayings) and landmarks, instead of solely a physical address through what they refer to as SIGuache, “a portmanteau of SIG (sistemas de información geográfica)—in English, GIS (geographic information systems)—and rasquache.” Such cartographic strategies map from below and draw on Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s concept of rasquachismo, a resourceful strategy that makes do with what one has and makes something out of nothing, one that senses all of the movidas that have come before. To read more see Silvia Fernández Quintanilla, Marissa López, and Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, “Introduction to “Dossier: SIGuache: Digital Mapping with Underdog Resourcefulness, Stance, and Style,”” Aztlán 49, no. 1 (2024): 133-148.
[4] Irene Lara, “Bruja Positionalities: Toward a Chicana/Latina Spiritual Activism,” Chicana/Latina Studies 4, no. 2 (2005): 10-45.
[5] Plática loosely translated can mean ‘informal conversations.’ It is also a progressive academic methodology that contributes to personal and community healing and serves as a crucial space of theorization. For further reading see Gabriel Hartley, “The Curandera of Conquest: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Decolonial Remedy,” Aztlán 35, no. 1 (2010): 135-161; Francisco Guajardo & Miguel Guajardo, “The Power of Plática” Reflections 13, no. 1 (2013): 159-164; Cindy O. Fierros & Dolores Delgado Bernal, “VAMOS A PLATICAR: The Contours of Pláticas as Chicana/Latina Feminist Methodology,” Chicana/Latina Studies 15, no. 2 (2016): 98–121; Socorro Morales et al., “Feminist Pláticas as a Methodological Disruption: Drawing upon Embodied Knowledge, Vulnerability, Healing & Resistance,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 36, no. 1 (2023): 1-13.
[6] Dolores Delgado Bernal, “Using a Chicana Feminist Epistemology in Educational Research,” Harvard Educational Review 68, no. 4 (1998): 555-583.
[7] Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa, Eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed. (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983).
[8] Kiri Avelar and Michaela Summers, “Disrupting and Reimagining the Archives: Interdisciplinary and Chicana/Latina Feminist Interventions as Decolonial Praxis,” in The Intellect Handbook of Dance Education Research, eds. Lynnette Young Overby, Billie Lepczyk, & Jill Green, 500-520 (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2025).
[9] Tresa Randall, “Teaching Dancers to Think Historically: Multidisciplinarity in Dance History Pedagogy,” Congress on Dance Research Conference Proceedings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
[10] Mary-Elizabeth Manley, Robert Bruce Bennett, & Mary Ann Lee, Roots and Wings: Virginia Tanner’s Dance Life and Legacy (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2023): 8.
[11] Manly et al., Roots and Wings, 13.
[12] Manly et al., Roots and Wings, 33.
[13] Harmony Bench & Kate Elswit, “Visceral Data for Dance Histories: Katherine Dunham’s People, Places, and Pieces,” TDR / The Drama Review 66, no. 1 (2022): 37–61.
[14] Informing our evolving understanding of the power and potential of screendance as a form of digital testimonio, we look to the work of Rina Benmayor, who writes about the use of digital testimonios (versus digital storytelling) in her classroom practice as follows: “When I use digital testimonio, however, I am being specific, keeping in mind the particulars of the genre. To testimoniar (testify) involves an urgent voice of resistance to social injustices, an urgency to speak out, a collective interlocutor, and a collaborative process of production and interpretation. Whereas digital storytelling might be used to emphasize the medium, using digital technologies to tell stories, digital testimonios place the emphasis on the story and its social purpose, in a medium that is digital. Thus, in my usage I try to retain the original political and liberatory impulse of the testimonio genre,” Rina Benmayor, “Digital Testimonio as a Signature Pedagogy for Latin@ Studies,” Equity & Excellence in Education 45, no. 3 (2012): 510.
[15] Aurora Levins Morales, “The Historian as Curandera,” in Medicine Stories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020): 73.
[16] Diana Taylor, “Performance and/as History,” TDR / The Drama Review 50, no. 1 (2006): 71.
[17] Taylor, “Performance and/as History,” 69 and 71.
[18] Jeff Friedman, “Oral History a Go-Go: Documenting Embodied Knowledges,” Tanzplan Deutschlandd (2008): 171.
Author Biographies
Alexia Maikidou Poutrino is a Greek-Italian choreographer and dancer currently pursuing an MFA in Modern Dance with a Screendance Certificate at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on Dance Theater and Physical Theater, exploring the choreographic possibilities that emerge from the partnership between movement and words. Alexia holds a BA in Dance from the Dance Academy Fyllis Mantziari and an Integrated Master’s Degree from the Theatre Department at the School of Fine Arts, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is also pursuing an I-PATH Diploma in Choreography with Rick Tjia. During her graduate studies in Salt Lake City, she has performed for Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Constance Anderson, and Aneta Parpouli, and presented original choreographies through the Creative Process to Production Graduate Group and the Screendance Graduate Group. In Greece, Alexia was a founding member of Bloom Theatre Group and Krama Project Dance Group. With Bloom, she presented works in Thessaloniki and at the Cairo International Festival for Experimental Theater. With Krama, she choreographed and performed in projects, earning third prize at the EurAsia Videodance Contest and presenting works in Greece, Austria, and Sweden. As a performer, she has danced for Ester Ambrosino, Blenard Azizaj, and Argyro Tsampazi.
Sophie Greenwood is a modern dancer from Salt Lake City, Utah. Sophie grew up dancing with Virginia Tanner at the University of Utah, and danced in their performing company, CDT for 12 years. Currently, Sophie is working towards a BFA in Modern Dance, as well as a BA in Family, Community, and Human Development at the University of Utah. As a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Sophie is interested in exploring human development, and how it can be highlighted and enhanced through dance performance and education. She finds dance to be an incredible way to explore and abstract the events of day-to-day life and is interested in creating work that reflects on not only her own experience, but the experiences of others. She believes that dance stimulates the mind and body in ways that encourage connection and cohesion for individuals of all ages, and acts as a way to increase coordination, strength, and endurance at all stages of development, and wants to bring that mindset forward as she teaches many generations to come. She wants to help transform dancing spaces into environments in which individuals can grow on a personal and communal level, creating an environment that balances fun, focus, and progression.
Kiri Avelar, MFA (she/ella) is a fronteriza artist-scholar and educator from the U.S./Mexico borderlands of El Paso, Texas/Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua. Her work is rooted in Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies, border(lands) studies, and interdisciplinary frameworks. She is a former Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellow for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and an NYU Teaching Fellow for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. While in NYC, she performed with the American Bolero Dance Company and worked with Ballet Hispánico for over a decade. She began her teaching career at La Academia de Ballet Emmanuel—a dance program she collaboratively established with her community in the U.S./Mexico borderlands for the Hogar de Niños Emmanuel orphanage in Ciudad Juárez, where she has worked with her family since 1999. In 2021, she co-founded the Latinx Dance Educators Alliance, a direct response to the systemic erasure of Latinx/e contributions, experiences, and ways of learning, teaching, knowing, and being in dance education. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Utah and completing her dissertation on dance and the Chicano Movement at the University of California, Santa Barbara.