Research Interests for Dasha Chapman

Dasha A. Chapman received her Ph.D. from the Department of Performance Studies at NYU. Her research examines the labor of contemporary Haitian dance artists, focusing on the political and ethical dimensions of the collectives they sustain through their teaching and performance work in both Haiti and its diasporas of New York and Boston. She is interested in the forms of sociality fostered by the labors of practice and performance in Haitian dance forms, and the ways dancing generates relationships to Haitian historical memory, Vodou aesthetics, lived realities and political contexts, as well as larger black diasporic imaginaries and cultural formations. Her broader concerns wrestle with the spatial and temporal potentials of corporeality and collective performance. While at Duke, Chapman will continue her work on Haitian transnational cultural production, Caribbean genders and sexualities, contemporary Vodou, and the quotidian as well as practiced ways in which performance allows for different modes of making a self through the process of cultivating collective ensembles. Chapman is also a dancer of Haitian, West African, and Afro-Cuban techniques, and performs with contemporary choreographers in New York City as well as in Haiti. ​

Areas of Interest:

performance studies
critical dance studies and dance ethnography
Haitian studies
African diaspora
gender and sexuality studies
corporeality
Vodou and black Atlantic religions
politics and performance