About
Clare Croft is a dance historian and theorist, as well as a dramaturg, curator, and dancer.
Croft is the author of Jill Johnston in Motion: Dance, Writing, and Lesbian Life and the editor of The Essential Jill Johnston Reader, which are both forthcoming from Duke University Press in October 2024. Croft is also the editor of the book and website Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), a collection of essays by scholars and artists. In connection to this volume, Croft also curates the EXPLODE: queer dance festival, which began as a series of performances in Ann Arbor, and has since toured to New York, Chicago, and California. Clare’s first book, Dancers as Diplomats: American Choreography in Cultural Exchange (Oxford, 2015), was a study of the U.S. State Department’s sponsorship of international dance tours as a form of cultural diplomacy.
Croft is the founder and curator of Daring Dances, a curatorial initiative based in southeast Michigan, that focuses on how dance—both watching it and making it—can help people find their ways toward sometimes difficult, yet necessary conversations. Through Daring Dances, Croft has had the privilege of collaborating with Detroit-based artists including Harge Dance Stories and The Gathering; the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn; and dancemakers of the Midwest, including T. Ayo Alston and Ayodele Dance and Drum, Leila Awadallah, Leyya Tawil, and Anna Martine Whitehead. As a dramaturg, Croft frequently collaborates with artists including Thomas DeFrantz, Jennifer Harge, and Andee Scott. With Scott, Clare has had the opportunity to perform and tour in a dance work co-created with Jeanine Durning, The Invitation Situation. Croft has also led community engagement work with arts presenters including the Fusebox Festival in Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon’s TBA Festival.
From 2018-2024, Croft has been the editor of the book series, Studies in Dance: theories and practices, the book series of the Dance Studies Association.
Croft’s academic writing has appeared in numerous journals including QED: Journal of LGBTQ Worldmaking, Dance Research Journal, and Theatre Journal. Her writing has been recognized widely. The Dance Studies Association recognized Queer Dance with its 2020 Brockett Prize for Dance Prize. Dancers as Diplomats received the Congress on Research in Dance’s Outstanding Publication Prize in 2016, and the article “Ballet Nations” received the American Society of Theatre Research’s Sally Banes Publication Prize in 2010. Dance Magazine named the 2019 EXPLODE queer dance festival in Chicago (co-curated with Anna Martine Whitehead) one of the “Top Dance Events of 2019.” In all her work, Croft seeks to cross the divide between academia and the art world, and she has written for venues like The Brooklyn Rail, The Washington Post, and the LA Review of Books.
Croft's work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Community Foundation of Southeastern Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance as Public Practice from the University of Texas-Austin.
Recent Courses:
- AMCULT 405: Dancing Women, Dancing Queer
- AMCULT 698: Research Methods in American Studies
- AMCULT 828: Pedagogy
- AMCULT 300: Practices in American Culture
Research Area(s):
- 20th- and 21st-century American dance
- performance studies
- feminist and queer theory
- US social movements
Affiliations:
Professor Croft holds an appointment in the Department of American Culture (AC) and an appointment by courtesy in the Department of Women and Gender Studies (WGS) in the College of Literature, Sciences and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Croft also serves as the University of Michigan's Faculty Director of Arts Research/Creative Practice, a position split across the Arts Initiative and the Office of the Vice President of Research (OVPR).
