Reimagining Preservation: Making Black Southern Stories Through Performance

Join us for a conversation between Wideman Davis Dance company Directors, Tanya Wideman-Davis and Thaddeus Davis, Aimee Meredith Cox (NYU Anthropology and CBA '24) and Imani Perry (Harvard University) on Black contemporary art practices in the wake of migration, re-migration, community change, and perceptions of southern art in rural ecosystems.

Participant Bios:

Aimee Meredith Cox (CBA ’24) is an Anthropologist, writer, movement artist, and critical ethnographer. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at New York University following her appointment as an Associate Professor in the African American Studies and Anthropology departments at Yale. Cox’s first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Duke 2015), won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing, and Honorable Mention from the 2016 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize. She is also the editor of the volume, Gender: Space (MacMillan, 2018). Cox performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn. At CBA, Cox is working on two monographs based on her experiences growing up and living through the intersection of race, gender, and status in Cincinnati, Ohio. The sum of these projects is entitled Living Past Slow Death.

Tanya Wideman-Davis (Wideman Davis Dance) is the Co-Director of Wideman Davis Dance and is on faculty as an Associate Professor at The University of South Carolina in the Department of Theatre and Dance and The African American Studies Program. With an extensive career as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, Tanya completed her Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University/ADF (2012). She continues to perform, research, choreograph, teach, and collaborate.

Thaddeus Davis (Wideman Davis Dance) is the Co-Director of Wideman Davis Dance and is on faculty as an Associate Professor at The University of South Carolina. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Butler University in 1993 and Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University/ADF in 2011. After an extensive performing career with leading professional companies, he continues to perform, research, choreograph, collaborate, and teach.

Imani Perry is appointed jointly as Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Perry received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2022 for South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Perry earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School, an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center and a BA from Yale College in Literature and American Studies. Her writing and scholarship primarily focus on the history of Black thought, art, and imagination crafted in response to, and resistance against, the social, political and legal realities of domination in the West. She seeks to understand the processes of retrenchment after moments of social progress, and how freedom dreams are nevertheless sustained.

She is the author of eight books, including Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which received the Pen Bograd-Weld Award for Biography, The Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award for outstanding work in literary scholarship, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction and the Shilts-Grahn Award for nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle. Looking for Lorraine was also named a 2018 notable book by the New York Times, and an honor book by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was a finalist for the African American

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This is an in-person event. The program will be recorded and posted to our Youtube channel. Please email [email protected] with any accessibility needs.

Photo of Wideman Davis: Thomas Brenner
Photo of Imani Perry: Sameer Khan
Photo of Aimee Meredith Cox: Fredrick Williams

Host or Publisher The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University