Ariel Nereson

PhD

Ariel Nereson.

Ariel Nereson

PhD

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.