Jennifer DeVere Brody Jennifer DeVere Brody earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.  Her areas of research are African American literature, Victorian literature, performance and cultural studies, and black feminist theory. She is the author of Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Duke University Press, 1998) as well as essays "The Returns of Cleopatra Jones," Signs (forthcoming) "Effaced into Flesh: Black Women's Subjectivity" Genders (1996) "Hyphen-Nations." Cruising the Performative Brett, Case and Foster, eds. (1995) 

Annemarie Bean Annemarie Bean received her B.A. from Wesleyan University (English, 1988); her M.A. in Theatre from University of California, Los Angeles (Theatre, 1990); and is currently completing her Ph.D. in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. Her dissertation is on gender impersonation in nineteeth-century American blackface minstrelsy. Her academic focus has been primarily on performance studies and intercultural performance, with a particular concentration on performances of race and gender in American performance. She is the co-editor, along with James V. Hatch and Brooks McNamara, of Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, published by Wesleyan University Press in 1996 and winner of the 1997 Errol Hill Award, given for outstanding scholarship in African American theatre studies by the American Society for Theatre Research. Professor Bean is also the editor of A Sourcebook on African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements, published by Routledge in 1999. In addition, Professor Bean has published articles and book reviews in numerous theatre and performance studies journals. Currently, Professor Bean is working on a book-length project on American performances of color.

 

Thomas Faburn DeFrantz is Assistant Professor of Theater Arts at MIT where he teaches African American Performance, Dance History, and Dance Composition among other subjects. He has published widely on black dance history and practice. He is book editor for the Dance Critics Association. He is a member of the International Association of Blacks in Dance, the Society of Dance History Scholars Board of Directors, and the Society of Dance History Scholars Editorial Board. He is editor of the forthcoming anthology Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance and a book-length study of Alvin Ailey's choreography titled Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture. He organizes the dance history program at the Ailey school in New York. As a performer, he recently danced his own choreography to the Morton Gould Tap Concerto with the Boston Pops, conducted by Keith Lockhart, and created a performance "Monk's Mood" a biographical exploration of the life and music of Thelonious Monk.

Harry Elam, Jr. is Christensen Professor for the Humanities, Director of the Introduction to the Humanities, Director of Graduate Studies for Drama and Director of the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University.

He is author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka and co-editor of Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Drama. He is finishing a book entitled, (W)Righting History: The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson and is co-editor of a volume of essays on African American Theater and Performance History with David Krasner of Yale University entitled A Critical Reader on African American Performance and Theatre History forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

He has published articles in Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly and American Drama as well as several critical anthologies. He has directed both professionally and at academic institutions for over fifteen years. Professionally, he has directed Blues for an Alabama Sky by Pearl Cleague- nominated for nine Bay Area Circle Critics Awards and the winner of Drama Logue Awards for Best Production, Best Design, Best Ensemble Cast and Best Direction- Two Trains Running by August Wilson, and Jar the Floor for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto California as well as Tod, the Boy Tod by Talvin Wilks for the Oakland Ensemble Company. Next March 2000, he will direct August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize Winning play, Fences for TheatreWorks in Palo Alto. 

Anita Gonzalez is currently an Assistant Professor at Florida State University School of Theatre. With research interests in Latin American and African American performance traditions, Gonzalez completed her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. Recent articles include "Caught Between Expectations: Producing, Performing, and Writing Black/African, Latino, and American Aesthetics," recently published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism and "Writing the African Womans Presence in Mexican and Central American Dance" forthcoming from the Institut Fur Theaterwissenschaft. Her book length manuscript titled Dancing Jarocho: Mestizaje, Myth, and Mexican Cultural Performance is under consideration at Wesleyan University Press. Ms. Gonzalez has received numerous academic and professional grants including two Senior Scholar Fulbright Awards, a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship, and a US/Mexico Rockefeller Exchange grant. Ms. Gonzalez is also a Director and Choreographer and performer whose works have appeared at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors, Dance Theater Workshop, Tribeca Performing Arts Center (New York), and other national venues such as Colorado Dance Festival and The Dance Place in Washington DC. Her last appearance in Boston was at The Harvard Institute for Art and Civic Dialogue as a collaborator on the MotherCourage Project with Robbie McCauley and Demeteria Royals.

Richard Collin Green III is the co-editor of Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure (NYU Press 1998). He has recently served as an adjunct instructor at CUNY, Duke University, and NYU. He is also a guest lecturer at the Alvin Ailey American Dance school and has presented papers at numerous conferences (ATHE, CORD, SDHS) and various colleges (Stanford, C Davis, UC Riverside, UCLA).

His work focuses primarily on representations of the "black" body. His current research for his Ph.D at NYU Performance Studies is located around contemporary performances that focus on the "Venus" Hottentot.

He has also been a dancer and choreographer and has published several articles on dance and the work of Pearl Primus and Asadata Dafora.

Monique Guillory earned her Ph.D. from New York University in 1998. Her areas of Interest include Literatures of the African Diaspora, Race and Identity Politics, Colonial and Post-colonial Studies, Feminist Theory, and Film and Cinema Studies. She is the co-editor of Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure with Richard Green, (NYU Press, 1995) as well as "Under One Roof: The New Orleans Quadroon Balls," in Race Consciousness, Black Studies for the 21st Century, Judith Jackson Fosett and Jeffrey Tucker eds., (NYU Press, 1994). Her current projects include research on women and labor in Haiti with a particular interest in women's roles as entrepreneurs.

John Jackson, Jr. a filmmaker and cultural anthropologist, received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 1999. His dissertation, Doing Harlem: Race and Class in an Ethnographic Land of Make-Believe, explores racial performativity in contemporary black America. Jackson has also published ethnographic work on urban conspiracy theories and spirit possession. He has produced several award-winning films, most recently Stompin' Down at Suga Love's, an official selection to the Rotterdam International Film Festival. Jackson has just begun preproduction on a documentary examining historical and contemporary African American usages of the bible. He is currently a member of Harvard University's Society of Fellows.

Jason King is a performer, playwright, songwriter, musician, vocal arranger, director and producer. He wrote his first musical, The Story of My Father, when he was 19 years old and it was produced at The Crossroads Theatre Company. Current creative work: a theatrical project on Abbey Lincoln, two new pop soul musicals Talent and Jump Up to the Future!. In his spare time, Jason is a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. Recent publications: "Form and Function: Superstardom and Aesthetics in the Music Videos of Michael and Janet Jackson" in the Velvet Light Trap: A Journal of Radio, Television and Film;  the anthology Bump 'n Grind: The Politics of Black Sex (editor, forthcoming); "Bodywork," the new issue of Women and Performance (co-editor, Jan 2000).

Marya Annette McQuirter is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the  University of Michigan. She focuses on social dance, urbanization, and  identity formation in the first half of the twentieth century. She writes about African Americans in the early to mid-twentieth century. Her dissertation is a study of the relationship between leisure and urban identity in Washington, D.C. In addition to being a historian, Marya is also a dancer who has studied and performed in Washington, D.C, Philadelphia, New York, and Ann Arbor.

Carl Hancock Rux Selected by The New York Times Magazine as "One of Thirty Artists Under the Age of Thirty Most Likely to Influence Culture Over the Next Thirty Years" (New York Times-1994) and featured on the cover of The Village Voice as one of "Eight Writers on the Verge of Impacting The Literary Landscape..." (Village Voice-June 1998), poet/performer Carl Hancock Rux crossed the disciplines of poetry, music, dance and theater in order to achieve what one critic describes as a "dizzying oral artistry...unleashing a torrent of paperbag poetry and postmodern Hip-Bop music; the ritualistic blues of self awakening; Coon songs and schizophrenic soul sestinas...from hellacious to hilarious, and back again... one of the most engaging one-man shows you're likely to see all year." (Ray Rogers-New York Post-1997) Having recently published an experimental collection of poetry and prose, "Pagan Operetta" (Fly By Night Press), Rux has also published poetry, fiction and experimental dramas in numerous journals and anthologies, internationally, including Action! Nuyorican Theater Festival Anthology (Touchstone), Soul's Survival; Black Power, Politics and Pleasure (NYU Press), Aloud! Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Henry Holt), Korper Lust Sprache (Literatur zur Zeit Konzepte Press-Berlin) and Listen Up! Spoken Word Poetry (One World Ballantine). He is the recipient of the 1995 Nuyorican Poets Cafe's Fresh Poet Award, and the 1996 Bessie Schomburg Award for Performance. Rux's plays have been staged nationally, including The National Black Theater Festival, The Key West Theater Festival, Mabou Mines, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Penumbra Theater, ETA Creative Arts Center and Performance Space 122. Rux was recently comissioned by George C. Wolfe to write a new play for The Joseph Papp Public Theater (currently in workshop) and he has also been comissioned to write an opera for The Foundry Theater Company. Musically, Rux has performed his work in collaboration with a variety of artists, including Vernon Reid, Mark Batson, Toshi Reagon, Nona Hendryx, as well as alternative rock bands, trip-hop DJ's, Latin orchestras, and West African drumming ensembles. Rux has also performed on world stages with The Alvin Alley American Dance Theater (with Jamaican multi-percussionist, Junior Gabbu Wedderburn), The Urban Bush Women (featuring an original composition by the avante-garde jazz musician David Murray), and Movin' Spirits Dance Theater (with Tony award nominated choreographer of "Rent", Marlies Yearby). He has also performed his work throughout the U.S., Europe, West Africa, Indonesia and Scandinavia, at numerous venues, including, The Joseph Papp Public Theater, The Brooklyn Academy of Music/Bam Majestic, Aaron Davis Hall, The Knitting Factory, Lincoln Center, The Berlin Jazz Festival, The Teatro di Beligni (Naples, Italy), The University of Ghana at Legon (West Africa), The National Institute for the Arts (Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire), The New Victoria Theater (Singapore/Hong Kong/Bali), The American Festival of Theater and Dance (Creteil, France), The Ebenezor Experimental Theater Festival (Lulea, Sweden), The Panasonic Jazz Festival, The Fez and Central Park Summer Stage, among others. Rux's debut album, Rux Revue (Sony/550 Music), pairs the artist with some of popular-alternative music's most inventive composers to date, including Beck/Beastie Boys producers, the The Dust Brothers, Elliot Smith producers, Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf, newcomer Alan Elliot, and acclaimed folk rock singer/songwriter, Toshi Reagon. Rux Revue is available now.

Anna Beatrice Scott is Acting Assistant Professor in the department of Dance at the University of California, Riverside. A former Ford Fellow, Anna is currently completing her dissertation in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, A fala que faz/ Words That Work: Performance of Black Power Ideologies in Salvador Bahia-Brazil. Ms. Scott's work examines the intersections of dance, racialized bodies, entertainment markets, and faith.