Bio

Melissa Blanco Borelli is a writer, dancer, cultural critic, and Senior Lecturer in Dance in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests include feminist historiography and performance ethnography, popular dance on screen, Latina/o performance, e-learning and pedagogy in the arts, and theories of corporeality and affect in relationship to neoliberal capitalism. 

Dr. Blanco Borelli  holds a BA in Music and International Relations from Brown University, an MA in Communications Management from University of Southern California, and a PhD in Dance History and Theory from University of California- Riverside. Her dissertation  “A Case of Hip(g)nosis: An Epistemology of the Mulata Body and her Revolutionary Hips” analyzes the tragic figure of the mulata and her crucial role in various forms of cultural production in Cuba, and throughout the Caribbean and Circum-Atlantic.  She contests the literary trope of the “tragic mulata” and argues that there can be no such thing as tragedy when an active body uses her hips to claim territory, citizenship, and socio-cultural agency. Dr. Blanco is working on a cabaret spectacle entitled “Mulata Madness” based on sections from her dissertation. 

Her scholarship endeavors to demonstrate how dance and theories of the body provide new methodologies for inquiries into such perennial issues of identity as nation, gender, and racialization. Dr. Blanco Borelli's monograph She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body examines the mulata body through comparative social dance and everyday embodied histories in Havana (and New Orleans) from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. 

Her edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (Oxford University Press, 2014) aims to "set the agenda for the study of dance in popular moving images - films, television shows, commercials, music videos, and YouTube - and offers new ways to understand the multi-layered meanings of the dancing body by engaging with methodologies from critical dance studies, performance studies, and film/media analysis.” Other publications include a chapter on undoing the tragic mulatta in Thomas F. DeFrantz and Anita Gonzalez’s Black Performance Theory (Duke University Press, 2014) and a chapter which theorizes embodied subjectivity through Hollywood dance films in Broderick Chow and Alex Mangold’s Zizek and Performance (Palgrave McMillan, 2014). Her scholarly work and other writings appear in Women in Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Brolga: An Australian Journal on Dance, the International Journal of Performance and Digital Media, the International Journal of Screendance, The Feminist Wire, and Huffington Post. Dr. Blanco has been featured in a documentary about Josephine Baker as part of the "Extraordinary Women" series.

In progress is a chapter for Alicia Arrizón's (UCR) and Deborah R. Vargas’ (UCI) forthcoming edited volume Sensualidades: Latina/o Sensualities in Sounds and Movements, in which Dr. Blanco does a critical performance analysis of the Mexican cabaretera film "Mulata" (1954). Dr. Blanco Borelli is also working on the edited volume, Mediated Moves: A Popular Screen Dance Reader.

Before her academic career, Dr. Blanco Borelli worked in the entertainment industry, coordinating soundtracks and music licensing for Overbrook Entertainment (Will Smith's company at Universal Studios), wrote liner notes for Rhino Records, and taught foreign languages (Spanish, French and Italian) to celebrities and students at a private high school in Santa Monica, California. She has taught and performed Afro-Cuban sacred dance in Los Angeles, London, and Havana, Cuba, and she dances/performs other Latino/Latin American social dance forms as well. Her teaching experience also includes appointments at UCLA, UC Riverside and Citrus College. ​She is an Executive Board member of the Society of Dance History Scholars (2010-2016) and on the Executive Committee of Society for Dance Research. Trained in Afro-Cuban dance, Dr. Blanco Borelli  has performed in New York, Los Angeles, and Havana.

As a 2007-08 MLK Visiting Scholar, Dr. Blanco Borelli was hosted by MIT's Music and Theater Arts Department, where she lectured and performed. She stayed at the Institute for another year under Dance@MIT's Visiting Artists Program.

Publications