Ann Cooper Albright

Biography

A dancer, scholar, and a 2019-2020 John Simon Memorial Guggenheim fellow, Ann Cooper Albright is professor and chair of the Department of Dance. Originally an undergraduate philosophy major at Bryn Mawr College, she earned an MFA in dance at Temple University, and a PhD in performance studies at New York University.

Combining her interests in dancing and cultural theory, including phenomenology, gender, sexuality and feminist studies, Albright teaches a variety of courses that seek to engage students in both practices and theories of the body.

In 2024, she was honored with an Ohio Art Council individual excellence award (her 8th OAC award).

Her latest book is entitled Simone Forti: improvising a life, and Ann will be performing book talks across the country over the next year. Her other books include How to Land: finding ground in an unstable world which offers ways of thinking about and dealing with the uncertainty of our contemporary lives; Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality; Modern Gestures: Abraham Walkowitz Draws Isadora Duncan Dancing; Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller; and Choreographing Difference the Body and Identity in Contemporary Dance.

She is co-editor, with Ann Dils, of Moving History/Dancing Cultures and, with David Gere, of Taken by Surprise: Improvisation in Dance and Mind.

Albright is the founder and director of Girls in Motion, an award-winning afterschool program at Oberlin’s Langston Middle School, and is co-director of Accelerated Motion: Towards a New Dance Literacy in America, an NEA-supported website that facilitates active learning and the exchange of teaching strategies and resources to support educators who teach dance studies as a humanistic discipline.

She is also a veteran practitioner of Contact Improvisation, has taught workshops internationally, and facilitated Critical Mass: CI @ 50 which brought 300 dancers from across the world to learn, talk, and dance together in celebration of the 50th anniversary of this extraordinary form. The book, Encounters with Contact Improvisation, is the product of one of her adventures in writing and dancing and dancing and writing with others, as is the forthcoming collection: Resistance and Support: Contact Improvisation @ 50. Her work has been supported by the NEA, NEH, ACLS, The Guggenheim Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council.