Ariel Nereson Awarded UB Faculty Research Grant for “Ecosystems of Care” Project

Associate Professor of Dance Ariel Nereson, PhD, has received a UB Faculty Research Grant through the university’s Communities of Care Seed Grants program for her project, Ecosystems of Care: Dance, Plants, and Poetry. Nereson was selected as the program’s sole awardee this year, recognizing the project’s interdisciplinary approach and its focus on care‑centered research and creative practice.

https://www.buffalo.edu/communities-of-care/research/faculty-research-grants.html

Nereson’s Ecosystems of Care: Dance, Plants, and Poetry is a multi‑year research project that activates “care” at the intersection of performance theory and practice and the interdisciplinary field of plant humanities. Integrating scholarly and creative research, the project draws on Nereson’s dual expertise as a historian of movement‑based performance and a practicing choreographer. Developed in collaboration with dramaturg Dr. Jane Barnette (University of Kansas), the project asks how encounters with plant life can invite relationships to time that counter sociocultural and ecological hegemonies—particularly the accelerated production timelines of neoliberal professional dance.

Central to the project is the development of tools for “deceleration,” framed as a potentially liberatory response to the speed imperatives that undermine human flourishing and disproportionately impact an ableist field. A forthcoming book manuscript combines scholarly analysis with a creative workbook that draws on plant time and poetic time as counter‑signatures to the production calendar. Guided by Indigenous ecofeminist theories of reciprocal care, including Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, the research demonstrates how sustainability ecologies, racial justice, and feminisms are co‑constitutive of care‑full pasts, presents, and futures.

Nereson’s research engages the entwined practices of poetry and gardening through the work of Emily Dickinson and Lucille Clifton, whose lives and archives students can encounter directly through UB Special Collections and local sites in Buffalo. While separated by time and circumstance, both poets found gardening generative of their art, offering models for linking land stewardship, environmental justice, and reparative creativity. In Buffalo, Nereson has developed garden labs using native plants as sites for choreographic research, student collaboration, and sensory learning. Future phases expand this work to include additional ecosystems and time scales, culminating in a focus on the redwood species Sequoioideae, where solo performance scores offer antidotes to the speed of professional artistic life.

Across its phases, Ecosystems of Care positions performance as both a theoretical inquiry and a practical practice of reciprocal care, aligning work with plant systems and artistic processes through a shared refusal of neoliberal speed, normative embodiment, and the assumptions of white supremacy on which they rely.

Anticipated Project Outcomes  
Public performances of creative research: Buffalo, NY (x2 – March 2026 and October 2026) and Lawrence, KS (November 2026)
Scholarly publications: co-authored chapter for edited collection (April 2026), sole-authored article for “Performing Wilderness” special issue (February 2027); book proposal for Wesleyan University Press, a leading academic publisher in dance and performance studies (December 2026)
Conference presentations: Mid-America Theatre Conference (March 2026) and Association for Theatre in Higher Education (August 2026)

Across its phases, Ecosystems of Care positions performance as both a theoretical inquiry and a practical practice of reciprocal care, aligning work with plant systems and artistic processes through a shared refusal of neoliberal speed, normative embodiment, and the assumptions of white supremacy on which they rely.

Anticipated Project Outcomes  
Public performances of creative research: Buffalo, NY (x2 – March 2026 and October 2026) and Lawrence, KS (November 2026)
Scholarly publications: co-authored chapter for edited collection (April 2026), sole-authored article for “Performing Wilderness” special issue (February 2027); book proposal for Wesleyan University Press, a leading academic publisher in dance and performance studies (December 2026)
Conference presentations: Mid-America Theatre Conference (March 2026) and Association for Theatre in Higher Education (August 2026)