Nadine George-Graves

Last updated

Nadine George-Graves is an academic who works at the intersection of African American studies, gender studies, and dance and theater history. [1] She holds the Naomi Willie Pollard Endowed Chair at Northwestern University with appointments in the Department of Performance Studies and Deaprtment of Theatre . [2] She is also the executive co-editor of Dance Research Journal. [3] She has a PhD in Theater and Drama from Northwestern University, and a BA in Philosophy and Theater Studies from Yale University. [4] [5]

Contents

Career

George-Graves formerly served as a Professor of Theater and Dance, Vice Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance, and Acting Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego. She was also the previous Chair of the Department of Dance and a Professor of Theatre at The Ohio State University.

George-Graves is also the past president of the Congress on Research in Dance. [6] [7] She also served on the executive boards of the Lincoln Theatre in Columbus, OH, American Society for Theater Research, the Society of Dance History Scholars, the editorial boards of SDHS and Choreographic Practices, and is a founding member of The Collegium for African Diasporic Dance (CADD).

Creative projects

Her creative projects include Architectura, a dance theater piece inspired by architecture, [8] about how we build our lives, Suzan-Lori Parks' Fucking A, and Topdog/Underdog. [6]

Awards

She is a recipient of the 2021 Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award from the Dance Studies Association and Dramaturg for Bessie Honoree Brother(hood) Dance! in 2020. [9] In 2016 she received the Diversity Equity Inclusion Distinguished Teaching Award; in 2014 she received the Living Legacy Award from the Women's International Center. [10]

Works

She is the author of a number of books and articles on African American theater and dance. [6]

Books
Chapters

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vaudeville</span> Entertainment genre

Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs or ballets. It became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, but the idea of vaudeville's theatre changed radically from its French antecedent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Federal Theatre Project</span> USA theatre company 1935 - 1939

The Federal Theatre Project was a theatre program established during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal to fund live artistic performances and entertainment programs in the United States. It was one of five Federal Project Number One projects sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, created not as a cultural activity but as a relief measure to employ artists, writers, directors, and theater workers. National director Hallie Flanagan shaped the FTP into a federation of regional theaters that created relevant art, encouraged experimentation in new forms and techniques, and made it possible for millions of Americans to see live theatre for the first time. Although The Federal Theatre project consumed only 0.5% of the allocated budget from the WPA and was widely considered a commercial and critical success, the project became a source of heated political contention. Congress responded to the project's racial integration and accusations of Communist infiltration and cancelled its funding effective June 30, 1939. One month before the project's end, drama critic Brooks Atkinson summarized: "Although the Federal Theatre is far from perfect, it has kept an average of ten thousand people employed on work that has helped to lift the dead weight from the lives of millions of Americans. It has been the best friend the theatre as an institution has ever had in this country."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pearl Primus</span> American dancer, choreographer and anthropologist (1919–1994)

Pearl Eileen Primus was an American dancer, choreographer and anthropologist. Primus played an important role in the presentation of African dance to American audiences. Early in her career she saw the need to promote African dance as an art form worthy of study and performance. Primus' work was a reaction to myths of savagery and the lack of knowledge about African people. It was an effort to guide the Western world to view African dance as an important and dignified statement about another way of life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katherine Dunham</span> American dancer and choreographer (1909–2006)

Katherine Mary Dunham was an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers of the 20th century, and directed her own dance company for many years. She has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henrietta Vinton Davis</span> African-American actor and activist (1860-1941)

Henrietta Vinton Davis was an elocutionist, dramatist, and impersonator. In addition to being "the premier actress of all nineteenth-century black performers on the dramatic stage", Davis was proclaimed by Marcus Garvey to be the "greatest woman of the Negro race today".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fredi Washington</span> American actress (1903–1994)

Fredericka Carolyn "Fredi" Washington was an American stage and film actress, civil rights activist, performer, and writer. Washington was of African-American descent. She was one of the first black Americans to gain recognition for film and stage work in the 1920s and 1930s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shirley Graham Du Bois</span> American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist (1896–1977)

Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.

Theatre Owners Booking Association, or T.O.B.A., was the vaudeville circuit for African American performers in the 1920s. The theaters mostly had white owners, though there were exceptions, including the recently restored Morton Theater in Athens, Georgia, originally operated by "Pinky" Monroe Morton, and Douglass Theatre in Macon, Georgia owned and operated by Charles Henry Douglass. Theater owners booked jazz and blues musicians and singers, comedians, and other performers, including the classically trained, such as operatic soprano Sissieretta Jones, known as "The Black Patti", for black audiences.

Urban Bush Women (UBW), founded in 1984 by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, is a Brooklyn, New York-based non-profit dance company and professional African-American women's dance company. The ensemble performs choreography by Zollar and several other choreographers, often with a focus on the experiences of women of African descent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Walker (vaudeville)</span> American actor

George Walker was an American vaudevillian, actor, and producer. In 1893, in San Francisco, Walker at the age of 20 met Bert Williams, who was a year younger. The two young men became performing partners. Walker and Williams appeared in The Gold Bug (1895), Clorindy (1898), The Policy Player (1899), Sons of Ham (1900), In Dahomey (1903), Abyssinia (1906), and Bandanna Land (1907). Walker married dancer Ada Overton, who later also was a choreographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aida Overton Walker</span> American vaudeville performer

Aida Overton Walker, also billed as Ada Overton Walker and as "The Queen of the Cakewalk", was an American vaudeville performer, actress, singer, dancer, choreographer, and wife of vaudevillian George Walker. She appeared with her husband and his performing partner Bert Williams, and in groups such as Black Patti's Troubadours. She was also a solo dancer and choreographer for vaudeville shows such as Bob Cole, Joe Jordan, and J. Rosamond Johnson's The Red Moon (1908) and S. H. Dudley's His Honor the Barber (1911). Aida Overton Walker is also well known for her 1912 performance of the "Salome" dance at Hammerstein's Victoria Theatre. This was Aida's response to the national "Salomania" craze of 1907 that spread through the white vaudeville circuit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George M. Cohan</span> American actor, singer, composer and playwright (1878–1942)

George Michael Cohan was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anita Bush</span> African American actress

Anita Bush was an African American stage actress and playwright. She founded the Anita Bush All-Colored Dramatic Stock Company in 1915, a pioneering black repertory theatre company that helped gain her the moniker "The Little Mother of Colored Drama".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Standard Theatre (Philadelphia)</span>

The Standard Theatre showcased Philadelphia's most talented African-American performers and jazz musicians in the early twentieth century. During its peak years (1915–1930), the Standard was one of Philadelphia's most famous and successful black theaters. Its exceptional success can be attributed to its owner, John T. Gibson, an African-American man who envisioned affordable entertainment for people of color.

Amara Tabor-Smith is a San Francisco Bay Area-based choreographer and performer noted for significant contributions to dance that draw on, celebrate, and reconfigure African-American and women's history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whitman Sisters</span> Black Vaudeville quartet

The Whitman Sisters were four African-American sisters who were stars of Black Vaudeville. They ran their own performing touring company for over forty years from 1900 to 1943, becoming the longest-running and best-paid act on the T.O.B.A. circuit. They comprised Mabel (May) (b. Ohio; 1880–1942), Essie (Essie Barbara Whitman; b. Osceola, Arkansas, July 4, 1882 – May 7, 1963), Alberta "Bert" (b. Kansas; 1887–1964) and Alice (b. Georgia; 1900–December 29, 1968).

Ida Forsyne, sometimes seen as Ida Forcen, or Ida Forcyne, was an African-American vaudeville dancer who toured in Europe and Russia before World War I. Professionally she was known as the 'Queen of the Cakewalk'.

Jill Susan Dolan is an American educator, author, blogger and feminist. She writes on theatre, sexuality studies, and feminist theory. Since July 2015, Dolan has been the Dean of the College at Princeton University, where she is also the Annan Professor in English and a professor of theatre studies in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Prior to Princeton, Dolan served as the Department Head of Theater and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, and as Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dolan's notable works include her blog The Feminist Spectator, for which she received the 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and Theater and Sexuality. Dolan also edited Menopausal Gentlemen: Plays and Performances of Peggy Shaw which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Drama.

Margot Webb was a professional dancer trained in ballet, waltz, tango, and bolero. She and her dance partner, Harold Norton, were one of the first African American ballroom teams and were known professionally as “Norton and Margot”.

Laurence Senelick is an American scholar, educator, actor and director. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books.

References

  1. George-Graves, Nadine, ed. (2015). The Oxford handbook of dance and theater. New York: Oxford university press. p. xix. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199917495.001.0001. ISBN   9780199917495.
  2. "Nadine George-Graves". School of Communication - Northwestern University.
  3. https://www.dancestudiesassociation.org/drj-submission-guidelines
  4. "Nadine George-Graves". dance.osu.edu. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  5. Studio, Familiar (2020-08-28). "Dr. Nadine George Graves joins the Dance Research Journal…". DSA. Retrieved 2020-08-28.
  6. 1 2 3 Nadine George-Graves, UCSD profile
  7. "DSA - Board of Directors". www.cordance.org.
  8. "Architectura by Nadine George-Graves". Theatre 167.
  9. "Outstanding Scholarly Research". Dance Studies Association. Retrieved 4 June 2023.
  10. "Women's International Center - Living Legacy Awards 2014". www.wic.org.
  11. Reviews of The Royalty of Negro Vaudeville:
  12. Reviews of Urban Bush Women:
  13. 1 2 "Award Winner Archive - American Society For Theatre Research (ASTR)". www.astr.org.