FORA.tv Speaker - Constance Valis Hill

Scholar of performance studies, Constance Valis Hill, is the author of Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History (Oxford University Press 2010) and Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2000). Her writings have appeared in Dance Magazine, Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, Studies in Dance History, and Discourses in Dance; and in Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African-American Dance (2001), Taken By Surprise: Dance Improvisation Reader (2003), Kaiso! Writings by and about Katherine Dunham (2005), and Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader (2008). She has been awarded the Deems Taylor ASCAP Award as well as grants from the John D. Rockefeller and John Simon Guggenheim Foundations. She has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and is a Five College Professor of Dance at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts.