Brynn Shiovitz is a writer, dancer, and educational consultant based in Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from UCLA and her MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has taught at the undergraduate and graduate levels at UCLA, Chapman University, and the American Musical and Dramatic Academy and was a visiting lecturer at Purchase College-SUNY and California State University-Long Beach. |
She is the author of Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywood’s Golden Age (Oxford, 2023), which explores a history of audible blackface and more covert forms of racial masquerade in live action film and animation during the 1930s and 1940s. She is also the editor of The Body, the Dance and the Text: Essays on Performance and the Margins of History (McFarland, 2019), a collection of newly-published essays which explore the many ways in which writing relates to corporeality and how the two work together to create, resist or mark the body of the “Other.” Her award-winning writing on performance can also be seen in SCREEN, Dance Chronicle, Women and Performance, Jazz Perspectives, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, and Dance Research Journals, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Newsweek, Jewish Journal, LA Dance Chronicle, Dance, Dance Spirit, and Dance Teacher Magazines, and a forthcoming Oxford Handbook in Black Dance Studies edited by Thomas DeFrantz.