Ninotchka Bennahum, dance scholar and curator, is Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sheholds degrees in History, Art History, and Performance Studies from Swarthmore College (B.A.) and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (PhD). She is the author of Antonia Mercé, ‘La Argentina: Flamenco & the Spanish Avant-Garde, Carmen, a Gypsy Geography, and co-editor of The Living Dance: A Global Anthology of Essays on Movement & Culture, with Judith Chazin-Bennahum (mom), and Flamenco on the Global Stage: Theoretical, Historical and Critical Perspectives. Co-curated exhibitions|books include: Transformation & Continuance: Jennifer Muller & the Re-Shaping of American Modern Dance, 1959 – Present (UCSB), 100 Years of Flamenco on the New York Stage; Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955 – 1972 (Vincent Astor Gallery, NYPL), Radical Pedagogy: Margaret H’Doubler, Anna Halprin, and American Dance, 1916 – Present (UW-Madison), and Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900 – 1955. Her current book project, Exile and Modernity: American Ballet Theatre in the Shadow of War, is forthcoming. A Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, her research focuses on trauma, war, and exilic experience. She is a member of Dance Chronicle’s Advisory Board.
