Thomas F. DeFrantz

DeFrantz studied music composition and computer science as an undergraduate. Directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance; group deploys bespoke live-processing systems in performance, crafting interfaces that translate movements into light and sound to underscore the creative concerns at hand. Received 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award, Dance Studies Association. Believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. Consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and voice-over for permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2016. Books include Dancing Revelations Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture (2004); Black Performance Theory, with Anita Gonzalez (2014); Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion; with Philipa Rothfield (2016); Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance with Kathy Perkins, Sandra Richards, and Renee Alexander Craft (2018). Creative: Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017;…these borders that keep me down …  for MOOGFEST2018. Professor at Duke University; recent teaching  University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; Lion’s Jaw Festival; Movement Research MELT; ImPulsTanz; New Waves Institute; faculty at Hampshire College, Stanford, Yale, MIT, NYU, University of Nice. In 2013, working with Takiyah Nur Amin, founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 300 researchers. Expertises: Black expressive cultures and their impacts on everyday life. 

Photo credit: Scott Shaw