Repairing the World: A Quest for Dignity in Dance. For Naomi Jackson, in memoriam

Authors

• Melissa Melpignano University of Texas

  Melissa Melpignano is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her current book project Unsettling Choreographies: Dancing Livability in Palestine-Israel examines recent choreographic practices that denormalize and invalidate settler-colonial ideas and mechanisms, generating new trajectories and models of livability. Her article “A Necropower Carnival: Israeli Soldiers Dancing in the Palestinian Occupied Territories” (TDR 67, 1, 2023) received the 2024 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics. Her research on Palestine, Israel, and on conflict at large through the lens of dance and choreography appears also in Dance Research Journal, Journal of Dance Education, Contemporary Choreography, among others. She obtained her PhD in Culture & Performance from UCLA.