Dr Melissa Blanco Borelli is a dance and performance studies scholar, choreographer, and cultural critic. She is an Associate Professor of Theatre and the Director of the Dance Program. She has been on faculty at MIT, University of Surrey (UK), Royal Holloway, University of London (UK) and the University of Maryland, College Park. Research and publications move through and produce work that centers Blackness in Latin America, Black performance theory, critical theory, critical dance studies, academic performative writing, popular dance on screen, (Black) feminist (auto)ethnography, historiography, archives and archiving, and the digital humanities.

She was the Principal Investigator in a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council/UKRI and Miniciencias funded grant project (2018-2021) that focused on embodied performance practices, memory, and archives. Blanco Borelli and her co-researchers at the Universidad de Antioquia worked with Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities affected by the Colombian armed conflict and created a web-based digital archive that highlights their worldmaking creative practices. The archive can be found at www.corpografias.com and her collaborative research on performance, embodiment and the digital continues via www.perbodigital.com.

Her new book, Aesthetics of Displacement: Movement, Archives, and Performance in Contemporary Colombia is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. This book examines Afro-Colombian and Gunadule experiences through the lenses of dance, displacement, and decolonial frameworks. It brings together performance art, Afro and Indigenous cultural identities, digital humanities, and archival studies. Additionally, it engages with decolonial studies, anthropology and cultural studies while addressing the historical context of displacement faced by minoritized groups. Overall, it highlights the importance of performance as a means of resistance and identity formation in contemporary Colombia.

Blanco Borelli is also the author of She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body which won the Dance Studies Association’s De la Torre Bueno Prize® for best book in dance studies in 2016. She is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (2014). Most recently, she received the UK’s Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) Best Edited Collection prize in 2022 for the special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review “Outing Archives/Archives Outing” she co-edited with Professor Royona Mitra (Brunel University) and Professor Bryce Lease (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama). She received honorable mention for Gertrude Lippincott Award (2009) for her essay “Y ahora qué vas a hacer, mulata?” Her scholarly work appears in journals such as Theatre History Studies, The Black Scholar, Contemporary Theatre Review, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, The International Journal of Screendance and in numerous anthologies including Black Performance Theory, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition, Zizek and Performance and The Oxford Handbook of Screendance. Forthcoming publications include chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance, The Oxford Handbooks of Dance Praxis, DISCO! Music, Image, Dance (Oxford University Press), and the Routledge Companion to Bodies in Performance. She was the President of the Dance Studies Association from 2019-2022. She has written op-eds which have appeared in The Feminist Wire and The Huffington Post. Her PhD mentoring was recognized with a Mentor of the Year Award 2021 from the University of Maryland, College Park.

She is an affiliate faculty in Performance Studies. Blanco Borelli is also on the editorial board for Contemporary Theatre Review, International Journal of Screendance, and the series co-editor (with Wendy Arons and Elizabeth Son) of Women's Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance (Bloomsbury, forthcoming July 2026). With Dr. Tia-Monique Uzor (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) she co-facilitates the itinerant summer school Performance Epistemologies of the Global Majority.

Some fun facts: She is a polyglot (6 languages), plays the piano, and loves fitness especially running.

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)