Mission Statement
The Dance GSA is an association of MFA students in Experimental Choreography and PhD students in Critical Dance Studies at University of California, Riverside. The Dance GSA exists as a social, research, and professional community forum that promotes creative collaboration at the graduate level. Our mission is to foster community within the Department of Dance, and to support and advocate for dance graduate students.
Dance GSA Officers
Michelle Cole, President
Erika Villeroy da Costa, Vice President
Sur S, Union & Department Representative
Maryam Malmir, Treasurer
Sammy Briseno, Communications Specialist
Critical Dance Experiments – March 5 & 6, 2026
UCR Arts Building, Arts 166 / Performance Lab
Critical Dance Experiments is a conference organized by MFA and PhD students in UC Riverside’s Department of Dance – it aims to rethink dance scholarship in its multiple forms, at the nexus of theory and praxis, and in response to the urgencies of our shared times and places. We consider flesh in its potential to interrupt, intervene, and/or reimagine an existence otherwise, seeking to address how our embodied practices, choices, and pedagogies as artists, educators and scholars transit between multiple conceptions of what the body is and what dance and performance do, and understanding the need to build coalition not against but through difference.
By calling in Hortense Spillers’ theory of flesh, we name the labor of Black women/femme scholars and artists who have contributed to shaping Dance Studies. We continue to interrogate racialized and gendered assumptions of personhood that underlie foundational terms and keywords in dance and performance, such as choreography, technique, performativity, and “the body.” We are interested in how academic research, aesthetic practices and teaching methodologies may contribute to disrupting or upholding hegemonic structures that condition our ways of being and perceiving the world.
Organizing Committee
dan delê, Chair
Michelle Cole, Co-Chair
SUR Sanford
Sam Briseno Jimenez
NO FEES FOR CONFERENCE. FOOD WILL BE PROVIDED.
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We are excited to introduce two of the scholars that will be joining us for Critical Dance Experiments.
Dr. Mlondi Zondi (USC Dornsife) will join us as the conference’s keynote speaker, bringing his work into conversation with our graduate student community with the lecture “The Loss of Loss: Dance and the Psychopolitics of Re-Assembly”. Our keynote is part of a collaboration with the 2026 Current Topics in Dance Research Colloquium Series.
Professor Moncell Durden (USC Kaufman) will join us as the conference’s invited artist and scholar offering two intensive workshops entitled “In the Groove” & “Aesthetic Flow” connecting conceptual and movement aesthetics from Jazz to House and Hip Hop.
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