Tara Aisha Willis

is a dancer, writer, curator, PhD in Performance Studies at New York University, and most recently served as Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

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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 most recently served as Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2017–2023. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University, where her dissertation focused on 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. Her monograph, Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness, is being developed through the Dance Studies Association and University of Michigan Press’s 2023 Studies in Dance History First-Time Author Mentorship Program. 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, and in the 2016 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture; she is a recent recipient of a Ragdale Foundation residency for her choreographic work. She held a Jerome Robbins Dance Division Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and has been an editorial collective member of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory since 2013. She has 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, 2024) 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 currently sits on the board of Links Hall and on the Artistic Advisory Board of The Field Center residency in Vermont. 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