Ann Cooper Albright

A dancer and a scholar, Ann Cooper Albright is Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at Oberlin College. Originally an undergraduate philosophy major at Bryn Mawr College, she received her MFA in Dance from Temple University and a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, Ann Cooper Albright teaches a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body. Her latest book How to Land: finding ground in an unstable world offers a new look at embodiment that treats gravity as the organizing force for thinking and moving through our twenty-first century world. Her other books include: Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (2013) which won the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize from the American Society for Aesthetics; Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing (2010); Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (2007); Choreographing Difference: the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance (1997). She is co-editor, with Ann Dils, of Moving History/Dancing Cultures (2001) and, with David Gere, of Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind (2003). Albright is the founder and director of Girls in Motion, an award-winning afterschool program at Oberlin’s Langston Middle School, and is co-director of Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy in America, an NEA-supported website that facilitates active learning and the exchange of teaching strategies and resources to support educators who teach dance studies as a humanistic discipline. Ann Cooper Albright is also a veteran practitioner of Contact Improvisation and has taught workshops throughout the U.S. and abroad. The book, Encounters with Contact Improvisation (2010), is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing and dancing and writing with others.

Profile photograph by John Seyfried