Dena Davida

Dena Davida, PhD, has been a contemporary dance curator, creator, artivist, performer, educator, writer and researcher for 50 years. She was raised in the United States, and immigrated to Canada in 1977. Co-founder/curator of Montréal’s Festival international de nouvelle danse (1985-2001), and the Tangente performance space (1980-2019). With a BA in dance from the University of California at Irvine (1970), she completed her MA in the Movement Studies Program at Wesleyan University (1995) and the Laban Movement Analysis Certification program (1996). She taught dance practice and theory in the Dance Department of the Université du Québec à Montréal (1979-2010) where she completed a doctoral dissertation (2006) on artistic dance ethnography. Her writing on dance, culture and live arts curation has been widely published in magazines, journals, and books. She co-edited the anthologies Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the worlds of dance (2012) and Curating Live Arts: Critical perspectives, essay and conversation in theory and practice (2018) and is currently co-founder and managing editor of Turba: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation.