Melissa Blanco Borelli headshot
Visiting Artist

Dance (MFA)

Melissa Blanco Borelli is Reader in Dance and Performance in the Drama, Theatre & Dance Department. She joined the faculty in 2013 to start the first joint honours programme in Drama and Dance. Prior to this appointment she was in the Dance department at University of Surrey. She has a BA in International Relations and Music (double major) from Brown University, an MA in Communications from the Annenberg School at University of Southern California, and received her PhD in Dance History and Theory (now Critical Dance Studies) from University of California, Riverside. 

She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (OUP, 2014) and She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (OUP, 2015) which won the 2016 De la Torre Bueno Prize for best book in Dance Studies by the Society of Dance History Scholars (now known as The Dance Studies Association). Other publications include chapters in Black Performance Theory (Duke University Press, 2014), Zizek and Performance (Palgrave, 2014), The Oxford Handbook of Screendance (OUP, 2016), The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Competition (OUP, 2018), and journal articles in International Journal of Screendance, and Women & Performance. She co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Screendance on race and nation in screendance. Her co-edited special issue on the popular as political for Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies is due Autumn 2018.