Quién soy

Kiri Avelar (she/ella), is a fronteriza artist-scholar and educator from the U.S./Mexico borderlands of El Paso, Texas/Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua. Her work is rooted in Chicana/Latina feminist epistemologies, border(lands) studies, and interdisciplinary frameworks. In her teaching she foregrounds translanguaging, sentipensante (sensing/thinking), border/transformative, nepantla, plática/testimonio/convivencia, and critical dance pedagogies to encourage liberatory research, teaching-learning, and creative practices. Her research focuses on transnational dance histories of the Latinx/e diaspora, using the Chicano Movement as a lens to consider border(less) experiences and contributions in/beyond the U.S. and challenge established notions of transborder identities in dance history and historiography. She employs collaborative, interdisciplinary research methodologies that prioritize the body, rasquachismo, and pláticas-testimonios in the interpretation of and contribution to (dance) archives, including film and screendance, embodied oral histories, photographic essays and collages, poetry, soundscapes, and feminist (digital) cartographies.

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She is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Before her relocation back to the Southwestern U.S., she was a Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellow for the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and an NYU Teaching Fellow for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. While in NYC she performed with the American Bolero Dance Company and worked with Ballet Hispánico for over a decade, taking on various roles, including teaching artist and dance faculty, choreographer, performing artist, curriculum development and teacher training for the School of Dance and Community Arts Parternships programs, and eventually served as the organization's Deputy School Director. She began her teaching career at La Academia de Ballet Emmanuel—a dance program she collaboratively established with her community in the U.S./Mexico borderlands for the Hogar de Niños Emmanuel orphanage in Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, where she has worked with her family since 1999. In March 2021, she co-founded the Latinx Dance Educators Alliance (LXDEA). A direct response to the systemic erasure of Latinx/e contributions, experiences, and ways of learning, teaching, knowing, and being in the field of dance education, today, LXDEA is a growing Alliance of 90 Latinx/e-identifying dance educators who work independently and across various institutions, including community grassroots and independent organizations, dance studios and conservatories, K-12 public and private schools, and post-secondary institutions.​​

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