Melissa Melpignano
Melissa Melpignano is the Director of Dance in the Department of Theatre & Dance. Her research focuses on dancing in contested regions. She received her Ph.D. in Culture & Performance from UCLA. She is a recipient of the Selma Jeanne Cohen Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars and served as a Board member of the Dance Studies Association. She serves as a UTEP Edge Fellow 2022-2024.
Melpignano's book, Moving Out of Control: Choreographies of Livability in Israel/Palestine explores how dancers attempt or manage to escape the logics of territorial, temporal, and ideological control, while resisting practices of coercion in the choreographic process. As a critical ballet scholar, she has a forthcoming monograph, Immemorial Presences: Variations and Reverberations in Ballet Librettos, which looks at marginalized 18th and 19th c. ballet documents to debunk hegemonic conceptualizations of ballet culture and technique rooted in colonial, patriarchal and heteronormative ideologies, and re-emphasize variations as an empowering tool in ballet practice. Her essays appear in the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, 50 Contemporary Choreographers, 3rd edition (Routledge), TDR The Drama Review, Dance Research Journal, The Dancer Citizen, among others.
With a background in various Western and Mediterranean theatrical and traditional dance and somatic forms, Melissa has worked internationally for two decades. She is a co-founder of the artist-led collective Somos Agua / We Are Water, whose mission is to tackle issues of water scarcity and unequal access to water in the Paso del Norte Region. She is a co-organizer of the annual UTEP World Water Week conference, and is curating the performance, Mapping the Rio. For her performance project #documance, she collaborates with visual artists, such as Sam Reveles and Angel Cabrales. With Cabrales, she choreographs and performs in The Uncolonized/Teoquiyaoatl.
Dr. Melpignano is curating the translation and publication of frontera poet, Gris Muñoz's Coatlique Girl.