Melissa Blanco Borelli is a dance and performance scholar, writer, choreographer, and cultural critic who studies how bodies carry history, especially the histories of Black and Indigenous communities in Latin America that official records have overlooked. She is Professor of Theatre and Director of the Dance Program at Northwestern University, and affiliate faculty in Performance Studies. She has previously taught at MIT; the University of Maryland, College Park; the University of Surrey; and Royal Holloway, University of London.

Her work asks what dance and performance can tell us that documents cannot. Bodies speak through gesture, movement, and corporeal responses. They signal and inscribe who people are, where they come from, and what they have lived through. By reading these embodied languages, she explores how people remember violence and displacement, how they claim identity and dignity, and how they imagine different possibilities for surviving and thriving in the world. To answer these questions, she works as an ethnographer, a historian, an archivist, and an artist, drawing on Black studies, feminist theory, decolonial thought, and critical dance studies.

In the classroom and the studio, she teaches students to treat dance as both creative expression and a way of understanding culture, history, and power. Her undergraduate courses range from Afro-Cuban dance, choreography, and dance for camera to dance history, dance theatre devising, as well as an emerging course on AI and performance making. At the graduate level, she teaches seminars on performance ethnography and critical theories of the body in performance.

From 2018 to 2021 she led a UK–Colombia research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council/UKRI and Minciencias, with partners at the Universidad de Antioquia. Together with Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities affected by the Colombian armed conflict, the team created Corpografías (www.corpografias.com), a public digital archive of the dances, rituals, and creative practices through which these communities rebuild their worlds. This collaborative work on performance, embodiment, and the digital continues through www.perbodigital.com.

That project is the foundation of her book Aesthetics of Displacement: Movement, Archives, and Performance in Contemporary Colombia (University of Michigan Press, 2026). The book highlights how Afro-Colombian and Gunadule communities use performance as a form of resistance and self-definition. Her first book, She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (Oxford University Press) traces how the image of the mixed-race Cuban woman has been staged, sold, and reclaimed. It won the Dance Studies Association's De la Torre Bueno Prize® for best book in dance studies (2016). She also edited The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, which looks at popular dance in film, television, and music video. She co-edited the Contemporary Theatre Review special issue "Outing Archives/Archives Outing," which won the UK's Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA)'s Best Edited Collection prize in 2022. Most recently, she received a commendation/special mention for TaPRA's Lynette Goddard Award for Research Excellence for a digital publication based on an epistolary exchange. 

She has shaped the field as President of the Dance Studies Association (2019–2023), as series co-editor with Wendy Arons and Elizabeth Son of Women's Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2027), and as an editorial board member for Contemporary Theatre Review and the International Journal of Screendance. With Tia-Monique Uzor (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK), she co-leads Performance Epistemologies of the Global Majority, an itinerant summer school centered on knowledge from the Global South and its diasporas. Her doctoral mentoring was recognized with the University of Maryland's Mentor of the Year Award (2021). Her public writing has appeared in The Feminist Wire and The Huffington Post.

Outside the studio and the archive, she speaks six languages, plays the piano, is learning the art of playwriting, and loves to move.

Education

• PhD Dance History and Theory (Critical Dance Studies), UC Riverside
• MA Communications Management, University of Southern California
• BA International Relations & Music, Brown University

Select Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

• Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, procured Artist-in-Residence Grant for Colombia’s Sankofa Danzafro, Winter Quarter 2025
• Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Collaborations Grant, 2024
• School of Communication, Inaugural Convergence Seminar Grant, 2024
• Alumnae Grant, Northwestern University 2022
• Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) (UK) Best Edited Collection Prize 2022
• Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) Grant (2018-2021) £266,559 for “Embodied Performance Practices in Processes of Reconciliation, Construction of Memory and Peace in Chocó and El Pacífico Medio, Colombia”
• De La Torre Bueno Prize®, Best Book in Dance Studies 2016, Dance Studies Association
• Honorable Mention, Gertrude Lippincott Award 2009, Society of Dance History Scholars

Select Publications

Books

Aesthetics of Displacement: Movement, Archives and Performance in Contemporary Colombia (forthcoming August 2026, University of Michigan Press)

She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (Oxford University Press, 2015)** De La Torre Bueno Prize®, Best book in Dance Studies, Dance Studies Association 2016

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Journal Articles

“Choreographing Displacement in Sankofa Danzafro’s La Ciudad de los Otros,” Theatre History Studies, Issue 41, December 2022.

Co-authored with madison moore. “TikTok, Friendship and Sipping Tea, or How to Endure a Pandemic” International Journal of Screendance, Spring 2021.

Co-authored with Olga Lucia Sorzano, ‘Performance Practices and the Conflict of Memory in Colombia: Working Towards a ‘Decolonial’ Digital Archive’, in Lease, B., Mitra, R., and Blanco Borelli, M. eds, Outing Archives/Archives Outing, Contemporary Theatre Review Journal, Spring 2021.

 “Presencing” Pleasure and Pain in Hispanophone Caribbean Performance, The Black Scholar, 49:4, 6-19 (2019), DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2019.1655365

“A Dance Between Chaos and Complexity: Choreographing the Spasm in Music Videos,”  The International Journal of Screendance, 6.1 (2016): Online publication n.p. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v6i0

 “Dancing in Music Videos, or How I learned how to dance like Janet…Miss Jackson” International Journal of Screendance, 2.1 (2012): Online publication n.p. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/ijsd.v2i0

 “A Taste of Honey: Choreographing Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance film” International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, Volume 5, No. 2 & 3, March (2009). pp. 141-153. 2040-0934 (Online)

“Becoming and Belongings: Lucy Guerin’s The Ends of Things” Brolga: An Australian Journal of Dance, December (2009). pp. 31-37.

“¿Y ahora qué vas a hacer, mulata? Hip choreographies in the Mexican cabaretera film  Mulata’ (1954)” in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 18:3, (2008). pp.215-233** Honourable Mention: Gertrude Lippincott Prize for best article in Dance Studies by Society of Dance History Scholars (now Dance Studies Association), 2009 **

Book Chapters

“Dancing in Our Living Rooms: Kinship, Diaspora and Intergenerational Moves” accepted to Oxford Handbook of Dance Praxis, edited by Anurima Banerji, Jasmine Johnson and Royona Mitra, Oxford University Press, Forthcoming 2026

“Aesthetic Displacements and Scriptive Things: Sankofa Danzafro’s La Mentira Complaciente” in The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz and Jasmine Johnson, Oxford University Press, In press, Forthcoming 2026

“Staging Waywardness: Confabulation and the Case of Elena/o de Céspedes” in Routledge Companion to Bodies in Performance, edited by Víctor Ladrón de Guevara, Roberta Mock, and Hershini Young. In press, Forthcoming 2025

““Put Your Body In It”: Disco, Divas and Dance Studies” DISCO: Music, Image, Dance (NY & London: Oxford University Press) edited by Mimi Haddon, Michael Lawrence, and Arabella Stanger. In press, Forthcoming 2025

"Community, Coloniality, and Convivencia in the Festival de Danza de Santa María la Antigua del Darién, Colombia," in Performance, Dance and Political Economy: Bodies at the End of the World, edited by Anita Gonzalez and Katerina Paramana, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021

“The ‘End,” ‘Lived Time’ or How to Say Goodbye to Your World, A World” in Performance, Dance and Political Economy: Bodies at the End of the World, edited by Anita Gonzalez and Katerina Paranama, London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021

"Decolonising Performance Philosophies" The Routledge Companion of Performance Philosophy, edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay, London & New York: Routledge, 2020

“You Can’t Out-Do Black People: Soul Train, Queer Witnessing and Pleasurable Competition,” The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, ed. Sherril Dodds, Oxford University Press, December 2018. Pages 515-530 ISBN: 9780190639082

“Gadgets, Bodies and Screens: Dance in Advertisements for New Technologies,”The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Ed. Douglas Rosenberg. Oxford University Press, 2016. Pages 421-438. ISBN: 9780199981601

“Dancing With Zizek: Sublime Objects and the Hollywood Dance Film,” Žižek and Performance. Ed. Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold. Palgrave McMillan, 2014.  Pages 165-177 ISBN: 978-1-137-40319-3

Undergraduate Courses Taught

• AI + Performance Making
• Dance for Camera
• Dance in/as Culture
• Theorizing Choreographic Practice
• Dance Theatre: Pina Bausch
• Dance Histories
• Dance Criticism
• Dance Composition
• First Year Seminar: Bodies, Space and Sound
• Afro-Cuban Dance

Graduate Courses Taught

• Dance. Performance. Ethnography (Fall 2024)
• Bodies, Theories, Performance (Spring 2023)
• The Politics of Love on Stage and Screen (at UMD)
• Performance, Violence and Memory in the Americas (at UMD)
• Theatre History & Historiography (at UMD)
• Introduction to Performance Studies (at UMD)