Tara Aisha Willis, Ph.D.

is a dancer, writer, and curator. She will be a 2024-25 Getty Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in the African American Art History Initiative, and is currently Curator-in-Residence, Dance at The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC).

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Photo Credits: Tara Aisha Willis, Photo by zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal.

Photo by zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal. Closeup of Tara's face, leaning on one hand. She looks calmly at the camera wearing a pastel striped top; silver tassel earrings hang down from her curly bobbed hair. Behind her a colorful, packed bookshelf

Tara Aisha Willis, Ph.D., is a dancer, writer, and curator. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and recently served as Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at University of Chicago (2022-24), and as Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2017–2023).

Her monograph in development, Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness, explores contemporary practices of improvisation and experimentation in Black dance performances, and was the first arts-centered project to receive the NYU-Wide Outstanding Dissertation Award in Arts & Humanities. The project is being developed through the Dance Studies Association and University of Michigan Press’s 2023 Studies in Dance History First-Time Author Mentorship Program, with support from Prof. Jasmine A. Johnson. She has held a Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, a Archival Research Fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow, a Research Fellowship at Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London, and is a 2024-25 Getty Postdoctoral Fellow with Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative.

Willis 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. She has also performed in the work of Sandra Binion, Kim Brandt, Yanira Castro, Paulina Olowska, devynn emory, and Anna Sperber, among others, and in the 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture. Her choreographic work has been shown at spaces like The Poetry Project, Links Hall, Movement Research at Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, Danspace Project DraftWorks, and Roulette Intermedium, and she has held residencies at Ragdale and Chez Bushwick.

Willis also worked in programming at the NYC dance incubator Movement Research from 2011–2017, 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 sits on the board of Links Hall, the Anti-Racism Taskforce of Chicago Dancemakers Forum, and on the Artistic Advisory Board of The Field Center residency in Vermont.

She has been an editorial collective member of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory since 2013. She 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 appears in the exhibition catalogue, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures (Getty Research Institute/X Artists’ Books, 2022) and is forthcoming in the anthology, Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories (University of Illinois Press, 2023; eds. Susan Manning and Lizzie Leopold) and in a collaborative experimental dance archiving book project with Shearn Coan and artist taisha paggett (Soberscove Press, 2025).

Download her CV here.

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Performance Studies Spotlights: Tara Aisha Willis

Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Dance Manifold: A Conversation with Tara Aisha Willis

Tempestt Hazel, Sixty Inches From Center