I am an interdisciplinary scholar based in dance and performance studies whose research cuts across technology, media, and society. I’m currently Associate Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University, where I research practices, performances, and circulations of dance in digital, screen, and computational contexts. My research takes many shapes, but in all my projects, I am interested in the screen as the dominant mode of our time—as a site for individuals’ cultural and personal expression as well as intellectual discovery and dissemination. 

I wrote Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), which really tries to grapple with the consequences of online dance transmission from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. I use the idea of the common as a through-line to understand how dancers negotiate movement as an expression of belonging that also circulates outside of communities of practice in an era of information globalization and participatory media. I argue that dance makes visible how political, cultural, and technological processes recruit participants at the level of their embodiment, offering an opportunity to consider the various projects into which we are enlisted without our full awareness or knowledge. From apps to platforms and from interaction to participation, I consider how dance in digital cultures both proliferates and extracts from a gestural common—and why that matters.

More recently, my scholarship has emphasized large-scale, multi-year digital and experimental humanities projects conducted by international collaborative teams. With my longtime collaborator Kate Elswit, I bring the digital humanities and dance history into greater dialogue through computational analysis and data visualization. Our projects together include Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (2018-2022; Ref: AH/R012989/1; winner of the 2021 ATHE/ASTR Award for Excellence in Digital Scholarship), Visceral Histories, Visual Arguments: Dance-Based Approaches to Data (2022-2025) and Radical Accounting: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Data as a Framework for Historical Imagination (2022-2025; commissioned for Edges of Ailey Sept. 2024-Feb. 2025 at the Whitney Museum of American Art). Our research adapts and develops geographic and spatial analysis, venue and audience analysis, and social network analysis specifically for performance history. We craft historical datasets and data visualizations to highlight the many individuals who compose a performing arts ecosystem across aesthetic genres, generations, and geographies; artists’ touring pathways and the importance of small towns in addition to the large metropolitan areas favored by performing arts historians; and forgotten works alongside canonical choreographies in understanding programming choices for regional audiences. Our team not only contributes new research methods for historical analysis in the performing arts; we also create new data visualization methods for digital research. We articulate our visualizations as demonstrative rather than decorative, argumentative rather than illustrative, and related as much to discovery as to display.

I am also building on my previous research on dance in social media to understand how videos shared via online platforms have become training data for artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the implications of AI for the performing arts. I also explore how theorizing from a foundation of dance and performance studies supports critical analyses of the bodily politics of algorithmic governance and how aggregate bodily data is used to manage populations.