A writer and director, Thomas F. DeFrantz founded Slippage: Performance Interventions in Culture and Technology, a group in residence at MIT that showed new work in 2004, 2005, and 2006. His creative work includes Monk’s Mood: A Performance Meditation on Thelonious Monk, a solo performance piece that marries tap dance to digital technology, and Queer Theory!: An Academic Travesty, an exploration of literary theory through music, monologue, and dance. An accomplished tap dancer, he has performed the Morton Gould Tap Concerto at Tech Night with the Boston Pops conducted by Keith Lockhart, as well as the Duke Ellington Tap Concerto with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra led by Mark Harvey. DeFrantz holds degrees from Yale, the City University of New York, and NYU, and has taught theater and dance at Stanford, NYU, and at MIT, where he is Professor of Music and Theater Arts. He is the editor of Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (Wisconsin University Press, 2002) and author of Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004). He organizes the dance theory curriculum for the Hollins University/American Dance Festival MFA program.. Updated CV available here. .

Thomas F. DeFrantz