Jody Sperling, Time Lapse Dance
Sperling's lecture discussed the emergence of Fuller's unique aesthetic, from its origins in the music-hall skirt dance to its developments into new technological media. Jody Sperling is the Founder and Artistic Director of Time Lapse Dance. A dancer, choreographer and dance scholar based in New York City, Sperling has gained an international reputation as an expert on Loie Fuller and is theforemost contemporary interpreter of Fuller's style. In the past decade, Sperling has created more than 25 works, including five solos and four group works that pay homage to Fuller, and many others that fuse modern dance and circus arts. She has taught, lectured and/or performed in the US, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Nigeria and Russia.
Joan Acocella
Joan Acocella is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she reviews dance and books. She edited the first unexpurgated edition of The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. Her other books include Mark Morris, a critical biography of the choreographer; Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism; and Creating Hysteria, Women and Multiple Personality Disorder. Her recent collection of essays,Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award in criticism, and it won the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also received the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research from the Congress of Research on Dance, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle.
Martin Puchner
Martin Puchner is professor of English and comparative literature at Harvard University. After studying philosophy, history, and literature at the University of Konstanz, the Universita di Bologna, UC Santa Barbara, and UC Irvine, he earned a Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1998. He has taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University since 1998 before moving to Harvard University in the summer of 2010. A writer a many books, Puchner's writing and research fall under three broad rubrics: drama; philosophy; and world literature. Puchner approaches philosophy primarily through its relation to drama and theater.In addition to his scholarly work, Puchner writes essays on contemporary literature, philosophy, and politics for such venues as The London Review of Books, Bookforum, Raritan Review, and N+1.
Raphael Cuir
Raphael Cuir is director of scholarly projects of the Institute for research in creation and creativity in Paris, France. He received his PhD in art history from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He has published numerous articles on the history of art and contemporary art, and has worked as a writer for Art Press Journal. He was a guest scholar of the Getty Research Institute from 2005-2006. Some of his recent works include the book The Renaissance of Anatomy (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), "Transfuge" La vie Mode d'[in]emploi, (Life: A [un]User's Manual, after Georges Perec), and Ed. Jean-Michel & Stephane Place, Paris, 2000. Cuir currently conducts researches on the representation of the body focusing on anatomy and art from the Renaissance to the present.
Thomas F. DeFrantz
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Music, Theater Arts, Comparative Media Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies at MIT. He is the director of SLIPPAGE: Performance, Culture, Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications, in residence at MIT. His books include the edited volume Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance(2002) and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture (2004). For many years, he organized the dance history program at the Alvin Ailey School in New York. He convenes the Black Performance Theory working group and the Choreography and Corporeality working group. He has recently been elected President of the Society of Dance History Scholars.