Dr. Jessica Friedman is a Lecturer in Theater and Dance at UC Santa Barbara and a dance curator. Her research examines how modern dance and dance theatre respond to global crisis. Jessica’s book project, Modern Dance in Crisis: Women’s Re-Makings in 1940s American Modern Dance, focuses on women choreographers’ negotiations of transnational crisis in modern dance during the mid-twentieth century. Her curation bridges dance and the public humanities. She is the author of articles, book chapters, and public scholarship. Jessica’s research has been recognized by awards from the Dance Studies Association, American Society for Theatre Research, and International Federation for Theatre Research.

Ninotchka Bennahum, dance scholar and curator, is Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sheholds degrees in History, Art History, and Performance Studies from Swarthmore College (B.A.) and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (PhD). She is the author of Antonia Mercé, ‘La Argentina: Flamenco & the Spanish Avant-Garde, Carmen, a Gypsy Geography, and co-editor of The Living Dance: A Global Anthology of Essays on Movement & Culture, with Judith Chazin-Bennahum (mom), and Flamenco on the Global Stage: Theoretical, Historical and Critical Perspectives. Co-curated exhibitions|books include: Transformation & Continuance: Jennifer Muller & the Re-Shaping of American Modern Dance, 1959 – Present (UCSB), 100 Years of Flamenco on the New York Stage; Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955 – 1972 (Vincent Astor Gallery, NYPL), Radical Pedagogy: Margaret H’Doubler, Anna Halprin, and American Dance, 1916 – Present (UW-Madison), and Border Crossings: Exile and American Modern Dance, 1900 – 1955. Her current book project, Exile and Modernity: American Ballet Theatre in the Shadow of War, is forthcoming. A Jerome Robbins Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University, her research focuses on trauma, war, and exilic experience. She is a member of Dance Chronicle’s Advisory Board.

Ninotchka thanks wholeheartedly the wonderful staff of the 92NY, Erin Lally, Alyse Myers, and Thinc design, without whom Dance to Belong would not have been possible.

Jeanne Haffner is a senior curator at Thinc Design, where she works on projects spanning health and science, energy, and the arts. She has been developing exhibitions and associated public programs, films, audio tours, educational materials, and publications for more than ten years. Her recent exhibition work includes the Jones Beach Energy & Nature Center, which has been honored with nine awards for architectural and exhibition design and was featured in a MOMA exhibition in 2023; an exhibition on tree science and landscape history for a new Visitor Center at the Bayard Cutting Arboretum (2024); and Hudson Rising (2019), an exhibition that explored the environmental history of the Hudson River from 1825 to the present. Jeanne holds a PhD in urban design history and theory from the University of Virginia and has published two books: the edited volume Landscapes of Housing: Design and Planning in the History of Environmental Thought (Routledge, 2021), and The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (MIT Press, 2013). Her writings on landscape architecture and urban planning have been published in Arch+, The Guardian, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Urban Omnibus, and featured on BBC Radio 3. She was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow in urban landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard), a fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Hofstra Universities.