Thomas F Defrantz

Thomas F. DeFrantz is a choreographer, performer, and scholar who has made Black dance central to performance studies while pioneering new forms of collaboration between bodies, theory, technology and live audiences. Born in Indiana, DeFrantz studied music composition and theatre at Yale College, then earned an MA in liberal studies from City College of New York and a PhD in performance studies from New York University, where his dissertation examined the choreographies of Alvin Ailey. That research established the foundation for *Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture* (2004), which connected choreography, touring, reception, race, civil-rights history and institutional development to show how Ailey's company became a major African American cultural institution. The book received the de la Torre Bueno Prize in 2005.

At MIT, where DeFrantz taught and chaired Women's and Gender Studies, he founded SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology in 2002. The lab brought together artists, scholars, engineers, students and publics to investigate performance, history and emerging technology through both research and public work. His earlier edited collection *Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance* (2002) helped establish collaborative networks in African diaspora scholarship. During his tenure at Duke University, where he chaired African and African American Studies and taught dance and theatre studies, DeFrantz convened the Black Performance Theory working group and founded the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, deepening the institutional infrastructure for Black performance scholarship across multiple disciplines.

SLIPPAGE's performances make research into embodied and technological practice. The "talkingdance" series combines movement, spoken argument and live-processing systems that translate gesture and voice into sound, image and light in real time. *White Privilege*, presented at Duke in 2018, framed a dialogic lecture-performance around race and complicity. *Soundz at the Back of My Head*, performed at Gibney in 2020 with collaborators Quran Karriem and Rebecca Uliasz, engaged experimental performance and the afterlives of slavery. In these works, gesture functions simultaneously as movement material, historical evidence and interface input, with improvisation allowing responsiveness to audience, speech and digital feedback.

DeFrantz received the Dance Studies Association's Outstanding Research in Dance award in 2017. He is currently professor in performance studies and theatre at Northwestern University, where he directs SLIPPAGE's Evanston base. His institutional commitments are described as anti-racist, proto-feminist and queer affirming—ethical positions that shape both his scholarly method and the collaborative structures through which SLIPPAGE operates. His work demonstrates that bodies, sensors, code, speech and audiences can think together without reducing dance to visual style or separating history from the act of dancing.