Thomas F. DeFrantz

Thomas DeFrantz looking away from the camera and wearing a black T shirt in black and white
Visiting Artist

Thomas F. DeFrantz directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research lab that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better and engage creative spirit for a collective good that is antiracist, proto-feminist, and queer-affirming. He convenes the Black Performance Theory working group, as well as the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a growing consortium of 325 researchers committed to exploring Black dance practices in writing. DeFrantz’s recent teaching includes University of the Arts Mobile MFA in Dance; ImPulsTanz, Vienna; SNDO (School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam; Juilliard, New York; New Waves! Institute, and as faculty at Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts; Stanford University, California; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts; NYU, New York; Northwestern University, Illinois; and University of Nice, France. He has chaired the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies at MIT; the concentration in Physical Imagination at MIT; the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and has served as president of the Society of Dance History Scholars. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voiceover for a permanent installation on Black social dance that opened with the museum in 2016.

Photo by Robbie Sweeny