Welcome, Professor Kiri Avelar!
The University of Utah School of Dance is pleased to welcome Kiri Avelar, who joins the faculty this year as an Assistant Professor.
Avelar comes to Salt Lake City from New York City, where she was a Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellow for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and an NYU Teaching Fellow for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. “I also worked with Ballet Hispánico in NYC for over a decade, taking on various roles, including teaching artist, dance faculty, choreographer, performing artist, curriculum developer, teacher trainer, and eventually Deputy School Director,” said Avelar.
Avelar began her teaching career at La Academia de Ballet Emmanuel, a program she collaboratively established with her community in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. The program was established for the Hogar de Niños Emmanuel orphanage in Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, where Avelar has worked with her family since 1999. Avelar also co-founded the Latinx Dance Educators Alliance (LXDEA), which she describes as “a direct response to the systemic erasure of Latinx/e contributions, experiences, and ways of learning, teaching, knowing, and being in the field of dance education.” LXDEA is a growing alliance of 81 Latinx/e-identifying dance educators who work independently and across various institutions, including community grassroots and independent organizations, dance studios and conservatories, K-12 public and private schools, and post-secondary institutions.
Most recently, Avelar presented her research this summer at the Dance Studies Association conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in a presentation titled “Transnational Family Dance Lineages of the U.S./Mexico Bracero Program.”
Avelar identifies as a fronteriza, Chicana, and muxerista, and describes her work as rooted in Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies, border(lands) studies, and interdisciplinary frameworks. “In my teaching, I foreground translanguaging, sentipensante (sensing/thinking), border/transformative, nepantla, and critical dance pedagogies to encourage liberatory research, teaching-learning, and creative practices,” she said. Her research uses a variety of creative mediums including film and screendance, embodied oral histories, photographic essays and collages, poetry, soundscapes, and digital mappings. “My research focuses on transnational histories of the (dancing) Latinx/e diaspora through the Chicano Movement, aiming to provoke thought around border(less) experiences and contributions in/beyond the U.S. and challenge notions of transborder Latinidades in historical and contemporary contexts,” she said.
School of Dance Director Melonie Murray celebrated Avelar’s appointment by saying, “Kiri brings a wealth of experience in various dance contexts, and we welcome her fresh perspective on contemporary issues in dance, dance studies, and approaches to dance education.”
Welcome, Kiri Avelar, to the School of Dance!