Janice L. Ross

Janice Ross, Professor in the Drama Department and Director of the Dance Division at Stanford University, has a B.A. from UC Berkeley and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford. She is the author of Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press, 2007),winner of a de la Torre Bueno Award 2008 Special Citation, San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books, 2007), and Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education (University of Wisconsin Press, 2001). She is currently completing an edited volume of essays about Leonid Jacobson and Jewish choreography in Russian ballet as a site of identity construction and resistance. Her research interests include dance and civic engagement, ballet history and dance in prisons. Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, edited by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press, 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, edited by Judith Brin Ingber (Wayne State UP, 2010), The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counter-culture and the Avant-Garde, 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), and “Improvisation as Child’s Play,” in Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan UP, 2003). In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship, she has received a Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship and a Jacobs’ Pillow Research Fellowship, as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. 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 numerous publications including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. She is current President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars.