Thomas F. DeFrantz, professor of dance and performance studies at Northwestern University, has served on the faculty at MIT, where he chaired the program in women’s and gender studies and led the concentration in physical imagination. He holds a PhD from New York University.

“I focus on dance, live-processing interfaces, and African American cultural formations,” says DeFrantz. “I also direct a research laboratory, SLIPPAGE:Performance|Culture|Technology, that explores emerging technologies in performance. The lab embraces a value system of antiracist, protofeminist, queer-affirming method to construct alternative models of history.”

DeFrantz’s books include The Routledge Companion to African American Theater and Performance (with Renee Alexander Craft, Kathy Perkins, and School of Communication emerita professor Sandra Richards); Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion (with Philipa Rothfield); Black Performance Theory: An Anthology of Critical Readings (with Anita Gonzalez); Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance; and Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture. He has served as president of the Society of Dance History Scholars and as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, where he contributed concept and voiceover for a permanent installation on Black social dance that opened with the museum in 2016.