ABOUT DUNHAM’S DATA

Kate Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance studies theory, cultural studies, experimental practice, and technology. She is author of Watching Weimar Dance (Oxford University Press 2014), about the strange things people claimed to see while watching dances in and from the Weimar Republic, which won both the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research and honorable mention for the Callaway Prize. Her new book is about the interdependence of Theatre & Dance (Palgrave 2018). Further awards and prizes include a postdoctoral Mellon fellowship at Stanford University, the Lilian Karina Research Grant in Dance and Politics, the Gertrude Lippincott Award, and the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize. Together with Harmony Bench, her digital work has been funded by a Battelle Engineering, Technology, and Human Affairs (BETHA) Endowment Grant through The Ohio State University, and most recently a project grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). She is Reader in Theatre and Performance at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and also works as a choreographer, dramaturg, and curator.

Harmony Bench is Associate Professor in the Department of Dance at The Ohio State University, where she is also affiliated faculty with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Translational Data Analytics. Her research addresses practices, performances, and circulations of dance in the contexts of digital and screen media. She is author of Perpetual Motion: Dance, Digital Cultures, and the Common with University of Minnesota Press in 2020. She has also contributed to The Bloomsbury Companion to Dance Studies, Routledge Dance Studies Reader (3rd ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, Choreographies of 21st Century War, and Dance on Its Own Terms, as well as Dance Research Journal, The International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Participations, and Performance Matters, among others. For several years, Harmony has collaborated with Kate Elswit on bringing the digital humanities and dance history into greater dialogue, most recently with Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry (Ref: AH/R012989/1). From 2014-2019, she was co-editor of The International Journal of Screendance with Simon Ellis.

Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard joins Dunham’s Data from the CulturePlex Lab, Western University (Canada). His main research interests lie in the use of data analysis to understand society and culture. He applies methods from the Digital Humanities and Machine Learning to cultural data in order to gain insight into a wide diversity of cultural phenomena. His doctoral work took a computational approach to gastronomic culture, resulting in publications in AI & Society and Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, among others. Additional interests include the application of such approaches to psychology and human behavior, new and social media, storytelling communities, and indigenous peoples, to name a few.  His most recent project is at the crossroads between writing and sociology, in which he analyses one million stories from the online storytelling platform Wattpad to examine millennials’ motivations and needs according to their fictional self-expressions in Wattpad stories — this interdisciplinary project aims ultimately to understand modern society’s needs and motivations. Antonio continues to work as Research Assistant at the CulturePlex.

Tia-Monique Uzor is a dance scholar and practitioner. Her research explores themes of identity, cultural traffic, movement, and popular culture within African and African Diasporic dance. She uses postcolonial embodied research methods together with movement analysis to consider the many ways in which dance comments on wider cultural, political and societal issues. Tia-Monique has both presented and taught internationally, and her research is published within collections in the fields of dance, geography and Black feminism. Her AHRC and Midlands4Cities-funded PhD is due to be awarded in February 2020 and she currently sits on the Academic Advisory Committee for Dance of the African Diaspora (DAD) at One Dance UK. Outside of the academy, Tia-Monique writes, choreographs and dances in various contexts.

Takiyah Nur Amin (Ph.D., Temple University) is a dance scholar, educator and consultant. Her research focuses on 20th century American concert dance, African diaspora dance performance/aesthetics and pedagogical issues in dance studies. Her research has appeared in several academic journals including The Black Scholar, Dance Chronicle, Dance Research Journal, the Western Journal of Black Studies and the Journal of Pan-African Studies. Her book chapters have been published or are forthcoming in the edited volumes Jazz Dance: A History of Its Roots and Branches, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, Rethinking Dance History and Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century (Duke University Press, 2019.) Dr. Amin is a twice-elected board member of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD), co-founder of CORD's Diversity Working Group, a founding member of the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD) and a host on the New Book Network's Dance Channel. An "interdisciplinary humanist," Dr. Amin teaches courses in dance history, Black aesthetics and the sociocultural role of dance in human society. Takiyah Nur Amin is a proud native of Buffalo, NY and is the eldest daughter of Karima and the late Abdul Jalil Amin.