Thomas F. DeFrantz (US)
Thomas F. DeFrantz is Professor of Dance at Duke University and specializes in African diaspora aesthetics, dance historiography, and the intersections of dance and technology. DeFrantz runs the research group SLIPPAGE at Duke University, a group that works to create innovative interfaces for the telling of alternative histories. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming.
DeFrantz is edited many publications, of which Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance received the CHOICE award for Outstanding Academic Publication and the 2003 Errol Hill Award presenting by the American Society for Theater Research. He has published extensively, with his monograph Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture receiving the 2004 de la Torre Bueno Prize for outstanding publication in Dance. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. DeFrantz has acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture. His ceative Projects include Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty, fastDANCEpast and reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW.
Recent teaching: University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice.
