A director and choreographer, Thomas DeFrantz has staged work for the Theater Offensive of Boston, where he is an affiliated artist, the Geva Theater in Rochester, NY, and many college theaters including Yale, Emerson, and MIT. He is a member of the Drama League of New York, the Dance Critics Association, the Society of Dance History Scholars, and the International Association of Blacks in Dance. He recently founded the MIT Dance Theater Ensemble, a co-curricular student performance group, and established this group Slippage: Performance Interventions in Culture and Technology in 2003.

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: A Musical 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 Associate Professor of Music and Theater Arts and holds the Class of 1948 Career Development Professorship. 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).

defrantz@mit.edu