HANNAH SCHWADRON

HANNAH SCHWADRON, MFA, Ph.D

Hannah Schwadron is Associate Professor of Dance History at Florida State University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in critical theory and dance history, choreography, and performance as analytical curiosity and serious play. Her creative and scholarly research focuses on dance humor and representational politics.

Dancing and writing on these themes led to Hannah’s first book, The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender and Jewish Joke-work in US Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), which tells the story of contemporary Jewish female parodists across contemporary stage and screen genres. Related essays have been published in Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World (Oxford University Press, in press), Shofar (in press), Theater, Dance, and Performance Training (2020), The International Journal of Screendance (2018), PARTake: The Journal of Performance and Research (2018), Dance and American Perspectives (University of Florida Press, 2018), Oxford Handbooks Online in Music (2017), the Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (2017), Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies (2017), Choreographic Practices (2017), and Dancer-Citizen journal issues 3 (2016), 4 (2017), and 6 (2018).

From 2013 to 2019, as part of ongoing theory-practice research, Hannah curated Field Studies, an annual creative development lab that allows performer-writers the space to workshop new projects with live audiences and peer review.

Her collaborative dance film Klasse (2015), made with director Malia Bruker and a cast of middle school students, won the Production Grant from Dance Film Association (NYC), and has been shown at American Dance Festival (Durham and Boone), Antimatter [Media Art] (Victoria, BC), Tiny Dance Film Fest (SF), Israelitische Töchterschule (Hamburg), Third Coast Dance Film Festival (Houston), where it won the Spirit of the Festival award, and ScreenDance Miami, where it won the Audience Choice award. Her second dance film Between I and Thou (2017) documents an improvisation dance practice with collaborators from Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Germany, and the US on the subjects of migration, relationship, and exchange.  It has been shown at Docs without Borders (online), Richmond International Film Fest (VA), and Toronto Short Film Festival, and Little Mexico Film Fest (Chicago), where it won an Award of Merit.