2022 Visiting Curator Lecture Series

The Department of Art, Saint Mary's College, and the Moreau Art Galleries presents
2022 Visiting Curator Tara Aisha Willis

Tara Aisha Willis will speak about her practice as a curator in Performance & Public Practice for the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. This is an exciting event for the Saint Mary's College community and the greater South Bend area!

Willis is a dancer, writer, in addition to being curator. She holds a doctoral degree in performance studies from New York University, where her dissertation focused on contemporary practices of improvisation and experimentation in Black dance performances.

She performed in a collaboration between Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine (2016–21), which traveled to Bard College, Danspace Project, Walker Art Center, REDCAT, MCA Chicago, and ICA Boston, and performed in the 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture; she is a recent recipient of a Ragdale Foundation residency for her choreographic work.

She held a Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and has been an editorial collective member of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory since 2013. She has served as co-managing editor of TDR/The Drama Review, and was co-editor of both a special issue of The Black Scholar with Thomas F. DeFrantz and the performance writing project, Marking the Occasion (Wendy's Subway, 2021) with Jaime Shearn Coan. Her writing is forthcoming in the exhibition catalogue, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (Getty Research Institute/X Artists’ Books, 2022) and the anthology, Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories (University of Illinois Press, 2023; eds. Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold).

Willis also worked in programming at the NYC dance incubator Movement Research, where she was the founding administrator of the Artists of Color Council. She was an original working group member of “Creating New Futures," the COVID-19 responsive guidelines for ethical dance presenting, and currently sits on the board of Links Hall and on the Artistic Advisory Board of The Field Center residency in Vermont.