Professor Valarie Williams Wins Ratner Award for Teaching Diversity in Dance

Divisional Dean, Arts and Humanities Peter Hahn and Deborah Ratner surprised Professor Valarie Williams at the autumn 2020 departmental “Informance” held on Zoom on December 4, 2020 with a presentation of the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award. “The Ratner Awards recognize faculty for making a difference in students' educations, lives and careers. Candidates are chosen for creative teaching and exemplary records of engaging, motivating and inspiring students,” according to the award website. “Each Ratner Award includes a $10,000 cash prize, as well as a $15,000 teaching account to fund future projects.”

Dr. Williams will use the award to create a teaching project utilizing a selection of global scores and archival materials from inside University Libraries Dance Notation Bureau Archives, housed in Special Collections, the largest archive of Labanotated cultural dances and movements in the world. “I propose to create a teaching project that builds on students’ desires to understand why something is useful, how dance can change the world, and where students can access materials to aid in their individual growth and research/creative potential,” says Dr. Williams. “Ratner support will allow students the opportunity to design projects that include interviewing international activists, archivists, artists about cultural/historical events related to their selected scores; engage with historians or critics; invite regisseurs of trusts or dance foundations, specialists in cultural documentation, or expert folk dancers. Output for the class can take on numerous forms: student-designed symposia, podcasts, websites, Instagram posts and ‘highlights,’ informal lecture-demonstrations/performances, preparation for presentations at the International Council on Kinetography Laban/Labanotation and, with the guidance of the curator, contributions to the DNB Archives.”

In addition to Dr. Williams Ratner Award, faculty in the department have recently received a number of important grants totaling nearly $200,000 in 6 months including:

1. Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme (GAHDT) grant (Dance Professors Nadine George-Graves and Nyama McCarthy Brown) for a virtual student exchange with the University of Cape Town
2. GAHDT grant (Dance Professor Nadine George-Graves and Music Professor Eugenia Costa-Giomi) for several collaborative projects between dance and music
3. GAHDT grant (Dance Professors Hannah Kosstrin and Harmony Bench) for a lecture series around the field in the time of Covid which has brought a number of speakers on DEI-related topics
4. GAHDT grant (Dance Professors Valarie Williams, Crystal Michelle Perkins, Nadine George-Graves, Associate Director of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion Larry Williamson, Jr. and Distinguished Professor and Chair of African American and African Studies Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́) for an Archiving Black Performance Project to help preserve the legacies of four Black female choreographers
5. GAHDT grant (Professor Nyama McCarthy Brown) for a Summer Dance Institute for High School Students
6. GAHD grant - Principal Investigators: PI: Thomas McDow (History), Co-PI and Project Coordinator: Jim Harris (History) Collaborators: Dana Howard (Center of Bioethics (COM), Philosophy), Jesse Kwiek (Microbiology), Susan Van Pelt Petry (Dance) for Pandemic Pedagogies. This project will work across the arts, humanities, and sciences to create a set of pedagogical tools that will inform and inspire students with questions about belonging, empathy, ethics, and stigma that are vital to understanding the social impacts of pandemics past, present and future.