Spotlight on Students

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PhD Student Sidra Bell

Dance Magazine Feature

How Pivoting to Choreographing Full-Time Changed 3 Former Dancers’ Lives, Creative Processes, and Work
by Lauren Wingenroth

Excerpt: "After years away from the stage, Bell recently started dancing again, performing in a series of collaborations with the sound artist Sita Chay. “That’s been really liberating for me,” she says. "It’s on my own terms.'"

"Bell appreciates that it’s becoming more common for dancers to start choreographing earlier in their careers, and that the categories of “dancer” and “choreographer” have somewhat collapsed. 'I think there’s a paradigmatic shift happening now, where things are more fluid,' she says. 'There’s more softness around dancing for much longer, and you can leave and return. I love that fluidity—I think it can create a more sustainable model for young artists to know that it doesn’t have to be so fixed in these categories.'"

New commission for ODC/Dance Company

Bell premiered her work "Areas of Relief" commissioned by ODC/Dance for the troupe’s “Dance Downtown” program April 10–13, 2025 at the Blue Shield of California Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, CA.

Check out the reviews and feature news stories>

Bell has also been invited to the Colby College Lunder Institute Think Tank this summer.

NBC4 WCMH-TV Columbus feature

NBC4 WCMH-TV Columbus featured Bell on the Saturday, March 8, 2025, 6:00 p.m. news for her performance at The Met, her academic work at Ohio State Dance and as an associate at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

PhD Candidate Alyssa Stover wins Ray Travel Award

The Ohio State University Council of Graduate Students awarded PhD Candidate Alyssa Stover with an Edward J. Ray Travel Award for Scholarship and Service in the amount of $1000. Stover is using the award to fund travel to the Pop Culture Association conference in New Orleans, LA this April 2025, where she'll be presenting a paper titled “Nox Falls and Foxy Noxy: Sampling and Remixing in Neo-Burlesque Performance.”

Activists in Motion Recognized as a Program of Excellence in Engaged Scholarship

The Office of Outreach & Engagement selected Activists in Motion (AIM), led by Associate Professor Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown, as one of Ohio State’s 2025 Programs of Excellence in Engaged Scholarship. In recognition of being designated a Program of Excellence, AIM was featured in the Office of Outreach and Engagement communications and acknowledged at the Office of Outreach and Engagement annual awards luncheon. It was also featured in the Office of Outreach and Engagement's online Engagement Asset Map (forthcoming in summer 2025). Dr. McCarthy-Brown and other award recipients were recognized at an awards luncheon at the Faculty Club on April 30 from 11:30 a.m. – 1 p.m.

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MFA Work Selected for ACDA National Festival

Congratulations to 2025 MFA graduates Alisha Jihn and Isabel Bowser who represented The Ohio State University at the 2025 ACDA National College Dance Festival in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown University and George Washington University performing MFA Student Benjamin Roach’s "/]]__/fringe..fruit_[." In addition to performing, all three attended classes while Lecturer Jonathon Hunter attended board meetings as Regional Director Elect.

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MFA Student Montë Murphy and PhD Student Jiara Sha win fellowships

Montë Murphy won a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for pursuing a course of study which requires advanced foreign language and area studies training. An Ethnochoreologist, Choreographer, Dance Educator, Filmmaker, Screenwriter, Healer, and Artist-Activist native of Raleigh, NC, Murphy leads his work with the voices and stories of his ancestors. He engages youth, underserved, and communities through creative art mediums to underserved communities and various indigenous wellness techniques. He is an archivist and preserver of Africanist cultural practices and traditions, a creator of safe spaces for artistic exploration through dance education and amplifies inclusivity of the the voices of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities.

Jiara Sha won a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT) Fellowship that recognizes the cross-disciplinary aspirations and academic accomplishments of graduate students in the Division of Arts and Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. Sha specializes in contact improvisation, somatic-based dance-making, site-specific performance, participatory audiencing and dance~ecology~technology.

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PhD Student Emily Kaniuka wins Outstanding Writing Instruction Award Honorable Mention

The Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Team at the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing selected Emily Kaniuka as one of their honorable mentions for the 2025 Outstanding Writing Instruction Award on April 16, 2025.  According to the WAC Team, Kaniuka's application "showcases a robust set of experiences and knowledge of practice and theory that considers her students engagement with writing in her teaching practices. We appreciate the range of experiences you have engaged as an instructor. It is compelling to hear about how you scaffold students' interpretation of dance and seek their insight through their own previous perceptions. Moreover, the committee was excited to see you valuing students' own experiences not only as a means to recognize them, but to further develop their identity development."

PhD Students Yujie Chen, Bhumi Patel, and Amy Schofield win Selma Jeanne Cohen Awards

Congratulations to PhD Students Yujie Chen, Amy Schofield and recent Alumna Bhumi Patel (PhD 2025) for winning this year's Selma Jeanne Cohen Award presented by the Dance Studies Association (DSA) at their upcoming conference June 25-29, 2025. Director of the PhD program, Harmony Bench, notes: “Each of the award winners is doing incredibly important work that exemplifies excellence in Dance Studies scholarship; it’s wonderful to have their contributions recognized in this way.” Notably, Yujie, Bhumi, and Amy also share the same doctoral advisor here at Ohio State: Hannah Kosstrin. Bench continues, “It is no surprise that these three award-winners are Dr. Kosstrin’s advisees. She sees the best in her students and pushes them to be their best."

According to DSA, "In recognition of Selma Jeanne Cohen's great contributions to dance history, the Society of Dance History Scholars inaugurated an award in her name at its 1995 conference. Now awarded by DSA, the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award aims to encourage graduate student members of DSA by recognizing excellence in dance scholarship." In recognition of "the originality of the research, the rigor of the argument, and the clarity of the writing," the awardees will each present the following papers at the conference:

Yujie Chen, “Bodies In Flux: Rock Youth and Chinese Hip-Hop Dance in Early Reform Era China,”
Bhumi Patel, “Disidentifications of Survival and the Borderland Body in Miguel Gutierrez’s This Bridge Called My Ass”
Amy Schofield, “‘We’re the Survival of Every Moment’: Vincent Griego’s Indita Flamenca”

MFA Student Zoey November wins first place at the Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum

Zoey November won first place for the arts at the Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum on February 28, 2025 for her oral presentation, "Making the Audible Visible: Improving Accessibility in the Performing Arts Through the Artistic Design of Subtitles." The Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum (formerly the Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum) showcases the innovative and exemplary research being conducted by Ohio State graduate students and postdoctoral scholars across the full range of graduate degree programs and research topics and facilitates fruitful exchanges between graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, the administration, and the public.