Janice Ross

Biography

Janice Ross is a Professor in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and Faculty Director of ITALIC, Immersion In The Arts Living In Culture, a new freshman residential program. Former director of the Dance Division she has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford. She teaches classes in Dance Studies, Dance History, Dance in Prison and Dance and Conflict. She is the author of four books including Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia (Yale University Press, 2015). 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 2001). Her essays on dance have been published in numerous anthologies including On Stage Alone, ed. Claudia Gittleman, (Univ. of Florida Press, 2012), Dignity in Motion: Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice, ed. by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance, ed. Judith Brin Ingber, (Wayne State University Press, 2008), 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), Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University press 2003). Her awards include Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, two Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships, 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 The Los Angeles Times. She is past President of the international Society of Dance History Scholars and past President of the Dance Critics Association and a former delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies.

Research Interest

Dance studies, dance history, dance in prisons