Melissa Blanco Borelli

Melissa Blanco Borelli is the author of She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body which won the Society of Dance History Scholars' 2016 de la Torre Bueno Prize for best book in Dance Studies. She has been faculty at MIT, University of Surrey, UK and Royal Holloway, University of London where she remains affiliated as a Reader in Dance Theory and Performance. Her research interests include identity and corporeality; blackness in Latin America; dance on screen; film studies; feminist historiography and performance/auto-ethnography; cultural memory; digital humanities; decolonial aesthetics; and thinking beyond "the human." A recipient of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, she is the Principal Investigator on a project that co-creates digital performance archives with Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities affected by the armed conflict. She is the current President of the Dance Studies Association.  

Research expertise: 

• Blackness in Latin America
• Dance Ethnography
• Dance History