Ariel Nereson
PhD
Director of Graduate Studies
Associate Professor
Research Topics
Dance Studies, Musical Theatre, Critical Race Theory, Historiography, Queer Performance
Education
- PhD, Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh
- MA, English, University at Buffalo SUNY
- BA, Dance, Choreography concentration; English, St. Olaf College
Bio
Ariel Nereson is Associate Professor of Dance Studies. Dr. Nereson’s research is at the intersection of embodiment, identity, historiography, and cultural production. She uses dramaturgical and choreographic analyses to study movement-based performance as art and culture in order to understand how communities interpret movement as meaning. Her first book, the award-winning Democracy Moving: Bill T. Jones, Contemporary American Performance, and the Racial Past (University of Michigan Press, 2022) is a history of twenty-first century US American performance that analyzes the choreography of Bill T. Jones as public intellectual labor, Black aesthetic praxis, and historical knowledge. Democracy Moving received the Sally Banes Prize (American Society for Theatre Research); an honorable mention for the John W. Frick Award (American Theatre and Drama Society); was a finalist for the Barnard Hewitt Award (ASTR); and was shortlisted for the Outstanding Book Award (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) and the de la Torre Bueno First Book Award (Dance Studies Association).
Dr. Nereson is currently at work on a book-length study of how and why universities commission artworks as part of reparations for their roles in chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide. Reparative Encounters: Universities, the Arts, and the Afterlives of Dispossession brings performance studies methods in conversation with the emerging discipline of Critical University Studies and the vibrant intersections between Black studies and Indigenous studies. This book maps and illuminates how the arts have been used to consolidate power and maintain investments in whiteness as part of universities’ identities, as well as the ways that aesthetic projects by minoritarian artists offer counter-methods of flourishing for systemically marginalized communities. She is also co-editing, with Noe Montez (Emory University), a collection of essays that will explore how we contend with issues of power, race, class, and gender in higher education, specifically as they relate to the complexities of theatre and performance studies programs.
Dr. Nereson is Co-editor of Theatre Journal. She is also is an active member and regularly presents at the conferences of the Dance Studies Association (DSA), Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), ASTR, and ATDS.
At UB, Dr. Nereson teaches courses in the BFA and BA in Dance programs as well across the graduate programs including the MFA in Dance and the MA and PhD in Theatre & Performance as well as co-convenes the Humanities Institute Performance Research Workshop. Dr. Nereson is also a dramaturg and choreographer.
Articles and Chapters:
“Allergies, Allegiances, and Authenticity: Bill T. Jones’s Choreography for Broadway.” Studies in Musical Theatre, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 2019. 23-36.
“Normalizing Disruption: Advocating for Reproductive Health in Academia.” With Adanma Onyedike Barton, Meredith Conti, and Kristi Good. Theatre Topics. Vol. 29, No. 1, March 2019. 59-70.
“New Women and Girls of Today in Motion: The ‘Strenuous Clasping’ of Tango Teas.” Performing the Progressive Era: Immigration, Urbanism, and Nationalism on Stage, 1890-1920, eds. Max Schulman and J. Chris Westgate. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019. 122-140.
“Communities of Gesture: Empathy and Embodiment in Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company’s 100 Migrations.” The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive Science, eds. Rick Kemp and Bruce McConachie. London: Routledge, 2018. 135-143.
“Sound in Motion: Bill T. Jones Repurposes John Cage.” Critical Stages,
special issue edited by Johannes Birringer. Issue 16, December 2017. http://www.critical-stages.org/16/sound-in-motion-bill-t-jones-repurposes-john-cage/.
“Counterfactual Moving in Bill T. Jones’s Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land.” Theatre Survey. Vol. 56, No. 2, May 2015. 166-186.
Conferences:
“A Genius Public: Site-Specific Dance at the University of Virginia and the Presence of the Past.” American Society for Theatre Research, Arlington, VA –November 2019.
“Choreographing History: Black Concert Dance and the Question of Genre.” Scholars @Hallwalls Lecture Series, UB Humanities Institute, Buffalo, NY – October 2019.
“Dance and Democracy: Empathy Rehearsals in Contemporary Performance.” Buffalo Humanities Festival, Buffalo, NY – September 2019.
“Commissions, Commemorations, and Racial Capitalism: Patterns of Arts Patronage and National Belonging.” Dance Studies Association, Chicago, IL – August 2019.
“A Necessary Invention: Choreographies of Black Womanhood in American Dance and History.” Mid-America Theatre Conference, Cleveland, OH – March 2019.
“Head in Trousers: Prosecuting Arousal in the Trial of The Pleasure Man.” American Society for Theatre Research, San Diego, CA – November 2018.
“Dancing Spring Awakening: A Postmodern Revolution?” Roundtable. Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Boston, MA – August 2018.
“Correct First: Confrontation in the Work of Bill T. Jones.” Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Boston, MA – August 2018.
“Romantic Revision.” Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College – June 2018.
“Lincoln the Lover: A New Spin on History in Bill T. Jones’s Lincoln Dances.” Mid-America Theatre Conference, Milwaukee, WI – March 2018.
“High/Low Dichotomies of Cultural Production, Race, and Authenticity in Bill T. Jones’s Choreography for Broadway.” American Studies Association, Chicago, IL – November 2017.
“Playing Uncle Tom in the Age of Obama: Bill T. Jones and Abraham Lincoln’s Shadows.” Escape from the Archive at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY – October 2017.
“Approaches to Teaching Dance Studies in MFA Programs.” Dance Studies Association, Columbus, OH – October 2017.
“‘Five Moons’ Rising: Considering Native/Indigenous Ballerinas in Disciplinary Histories.” Association for Theatre in Higher Education, Las Vegas, NV – August 2017.
Journals:
Book Review Editor, Theatre History Studies
Special Journal Issue: “The Embodied Arts.” Co-edited with Lezlie Cross. The Journal of American Drama and Theatre. Vol. 31, No. 3. Spring 2019.
Editorial Board Member, 2016 - present
The Journal of American Drama and Theatre
Editorial Board Member, 2014 - present
Theatre Annual: A Journal of Theatre and Performance of the Americas