Mark Franko

Mark Franko is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Dance at Boyer College of Music and Dance, Temple University. His career extends from professional activity as dancer and choreographer to interdisciplinary dance scholarship. A native New Yorker, Franko first appeared with the Paul Sanasardo Dance Company in 1966. In 1985 he founded his own company, NovAntiqua, and also worked with Movement Research. Franko earned his Ph.D. in French and Romance Philology at Columbia University, and has taught French literature, dance and dance history at Columbia University, Princeton University, Paris 8, Purdue, Montpellier 3, Université de Nice, UC Santa Cruz, Freie Universiteit Berlin, and Bard College. His choreography has been produced at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, Berlin Werkstatt Festival, Getty Center, Montpellier Opera, Toulon Art Museum, Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Mozarteum (Salzburg), Grove Theater (London), Stuk Festival (Leuven), and in company seasons in New York City and San Francisco.

His Guggenheim project, Serge Lifar and the Crisis of Neoclassicism, is a study of French dance and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. It examines the interwar discourses of classicism and neoclassicism in French dance from the 1920s through the Occupation.

His books range in scope from the early modern to the modern and postmodern. They include: The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement and Identity in the 1930s, Martha Graham in Love and War: the Life in the Work, Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics, and Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. He is editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Reenactment, and founding series editor of Oxford Studies in Dance Theory. Franko has been Getty Scholar, NEH Fellow in the Humanities, International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study, and UC President’s Faculty Research Fellow in the Humanities. He received the 2011 Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award of the Congress in Research in Dance. Choreographing Discourses: a Mark Franko Reader is in preparation at Routledge.