(PhD, NYU Performance Studies)  is currently Visiting Professor of African American Studies and Theater at Yale and Professor of Music, Theater Arts, Comparative Media Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT. His books include the edited volume Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002, winner of the CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Publication and the Errol Hill Award presented by the American Society for Theater Research) and Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2004, winner of the de la Torre Bueno Prize for Outstanding Publication in Dance).

A director and writer, his creative works include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts. In 2005 he designed the history and theory component of the American Dance Festival/Hollins University MFA Program in dance, where he remains on the core faculty.

He has worked as a dramaturg for Donald Byrd, and assistant to Louis Johnson and Honi Coles. He performed the “Morton Gould Tap Concerto” with the Boston Pops conducted by Keith Lockhart and the “Duke Ellington Tap Concerto (David Danced)” with the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra conducted by Mark Harvey. DeFrantz served on the boards for the Society of Dance History Scholars, as Book Editor for the Dance Critics Association, and organized the dance history program at the Alvin Ailey School in New York for many years.

A globally-circulating academic and artist, he has taught at NYU, Stanford, Hampshire College, MIT, and Yale; has presented his research by invitation in Australia, Canada, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, and Sweden; and performed in Botswana, France, India, and South Africa. He co-convenes the working group Black Performance Theory as well as the international group Choreography and Corporeality, and recently convened an event “Dance Technologies and Global Circulations of the Social” at Yale. At Yale, he delivered the 2009 Charles Davis Memorial Lecture, "Performing a Persistent Past: Dance, Memory and Cultural (Re)Production.”  Professor DeFrantz is always interested in stories, how we tell them, and what we think they might mean. ,

defrantz at mit dot edu

SLIPPAGE: performance|culture|technology