Associate Professor Tanya Calamoneri co-organized a panel and Presented a paper for the Dance Studies Association in Washington, D.C. pictured here with two other butoh scholars and panel co-organizers, Bruce Baird (University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and Megan Nicely (University of San Francisco).
Assistant Professor Irvin Manuel Gonzalez published his essay titled"Si|embrando Life and Sowing Care: Refusing Gentrification on West Jefferson Boulevard" in Theatre Journal and contributed two invited chapters for upcoming anthologies on queer partner dancing and dance communities in Chicago. This year, he was named the invited artist-scholar by Theater X in Berlin, Germany, where he presented his embodied research on migration and transborder community-building practices. Additionally, he shared and performed his NEA-funded work with Primera Generación Dance Collective at the Mark Morris Dance Center in New York City as part of Dance Magazine’s 25 to Watch Live!
Associate Professor Hannah Kosstrin published the article “Dege Feder, Dancing Mobile Geographies: Ethiopian Jewish Contemporary Dance Migrations in Israel” in Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. This article is from her forthcoming book Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations, which tells stories of Jewish migration histories through dance practices and poses diaspora as a bodily experience through which people find home. With collaborator David Ralley, she presented the Laban movement notation app KineScribe at the biennial conference of the International Council of Kinetography Laban/Labanotation which Ohio State hosted in July. In her role as Director of Ohio State’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies, she was awarded a Global Arts and Humanities Centers and Institutes Grant with the Middle East Studies Center and Center for Ethics and Human Values for the two-year project Multi-ethnic Cultural Reproductions in the Middle East (MCRME), which addresses questions about cross-cutting influences of minoritized communities embedded in the Middle East through collaborative research, dialogue, and artistic productions.
Last summer Assistant Professor Kym McDaniel was an artist-in-residence at Prisma Éstudio in Lisbon, Portugal, where she began developing a series of new films called Room Studies. After her residency, she went to London where she taught a dance film workshop at not/nowhere, artist workers’ cooperative, and visited Beaconsfield Gallery, where two of her films, a story that doesn’t have to do with me (2021) and Document With No End (2025) were playing as part of a curation by A.L. Steiner. She presented her research on memory, embodiment, and trauma recovery at the Beyond Trauma: Interdisciplinary Conference on Imagining Ways to Move Beyond a Traumatic Past, a conference co-hosted by the University of Texas Rio Grande in Nice, France. She is in post-production for three new films titled, positive/negative/trace, fracture summer, and weightless, and is currently in the process of writing the chapter, “The Camera and My Neck: The Choreography of Chronic Pain” for the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Disability, to be published by Oxford University Press.
Still of McDaniel's Document With No End
The Dance Notation Bureau Extension Center for Education and Research, directed by Professor Valarie Williams, and in collaboration with Curator of Dance Mara Frazier and Associate Professor Hannah Kosstrin hosted the 34th Biennial Conference of the International Council of Kinetography Laban/Labanotation (ICKL) entitled Scoring Gaps: Notating Pasts and Futures, July 13-19, 2025. The Division of Arts and Humanities; University Libraries; and the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Arts sponsored the conference that welcomed over sixty notators from twelve countries across five continents. The Center also collaborated with the Dance Notation Bureau in New York, New York to host the Teacher Certification Course that certified eight new professionals in the field to teach as the Elementary Level of Labanotation, July 7-12. Williams, a certified professional notator, continued her professional teaching throughout the summer as part of her duties as director of the DNB Extension Center and member of the DNB Board of Trustees for the DNB’s Advanced Labanotation Course.
Valarie Williams, Professor of Dance and serving as the University Senate’s Faculty Council Chair, presented with Mara Fraizer, Associate Professor and Curator of Dance University Libraries, and Julia Brodie, Professor of Dance at Kenyon College, at the International Council of Kinetography Laban/Labanotation (ICKL) on their two-year project featuring 19 dancers from Ohio State and 11 from Kenyon College that focused on José Limón’s legendary work Missa Brevis (1958). They discussed outreach and engagement components, the multiple performances on both campuses and the final production Dancing Together: Resilience and Community at the historic Mt. Vernon, Ohio Theater. The work, directed from two Labanotation scores by Williams, Frazier, and Brodie, was coached and checked by José Limón Foundation Artistic Director Dante Puleio.
Co-creators Crystal Perkins and Valarie Williams presented their five-year project Archiving Black Performance at the July International Council of Kinetography Laban/Labanotation Conference. The panel led by Perkins included Mara Frazier, Bebe Miller, Ursula Payne, and Valarie Williams, with performances by Perkins and Payne. They discussed the original four women archived from 2021-2024 and the February 2025 residency produced and presented by the Harry L. Wexner Center for the Arts that featured six women of the next generation: Archiving Black Performance: Roots and Futures: Holly Bass, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Jennifer Harge, Ursula Payne, Crystal Michelle Perkins, and Vershawn Sanders-Ward.
Professor Norah Zuniga Shaw, Director for Dance and Technology Ohio State Dance and the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) partnered this summer with the Doris Duke Foundation (DDF) tolead a national research exchange on XR Performance. With her collaborators at ACCAD, Zuniga-Shaw brought together MFA students in Dance and Design with a cohort of national leaders in performance—including artists, curators, presenters, producers, and technology researchers. Zuniga Shaw says, “together we’re exploring how XR and AI can help us reimagine the future of live performance—making it more accessible, more collaborative, and more sustainable.” Read more about this work>
