Janice Ross

Dance Division Director; Professor (Teaching), dance history, performance art, postmodern dance. Janice Ross has a B.A. from UC Berkeley and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford. Her books include Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press, 2007), and San Francisco Ballet: An American Voice in Ballet (Chronicle Books, 2007). Her research interests include contemporary performance as activism and dance in prisons. Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge, 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), “Improvisation as Child's Play,” in Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University Press, 2003). Her awards include a Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Peninsula Community Foundation. For ten years she was the staff dance critic for The Oakland Tribune and for twenty years a contributing editor to Dance Magazine. Her articles on dance have appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past president of the Dance Critics Association, a current member of the board of CORD and President-elect of the Society of Dance History Scholars.