InForm Spring 2026 🔗 in bio > click on news
For the past 15 months I have had the distinct pleasure of being a guest in the Department of Dance in the role of interim chair. During this time, I have learned why the department has long been designated a “Center of Excellence” at Ohio State and recognized globally as a leading program (arguably the leading program) in the disciplines of dance and dance studies. I have constantly marveled at the creative genius and scholarly rigor of the department’s faculty, the unrivalled dedication and ingenuity of its staff, and the unbridled energy and eagerness to learn on the part of its students—characteristics so abundantly evidenced by the accolades trumpeted elsewhere in this edition of InForm. During my brief time in the department I am particularly honored to have been able to recruit two new faculty members—Assistant Professor Gerson Lanza Ruiz and Assistant Professor of Practice Cyrah L. Ward—into the program and to have participated in the successful reviews for promotion to the rank of professor of three others: Harmony Bench, Daniel Roberts, and Abby Zbikowski. And even though I had no personal role in the process, I am also thrilled to have been at the helm when we welcomed on board our newest staff member, production and stage specialist extraordinaire Madi Andre. Because my brief time in the department is probably best regarded as having constituted something of a “holding pattern,” I am eager to hand off the reins to the incoming chair, Associate Professor Crystal Perkins, whose four-year term begins on July 1 and under whose sage stewardship the department is destined, I believe, to reach unprecedented heights of achievement. Finally, I wish to close this message by expressing my thanks to Dean David Horn and Divisional Dean Dana Renga for entrusting me with this assignment as well as my most heartfelt thanks to all who welcomed me so warmly into the department and treated me with such consummate grace and patience throughout the last year and a half. I will undoubtedly regard my time in the Department of Dance as one of the highlights of my academic career.
GO BUCKS!!!
Andrew C. Shelton
Interim Chair
🎉 Please join us in giving a shout out to Jiara Sha for successfully defending her MFA thesis, "Feral Fringe." Sha (center front) is pictured here with committee members Amy Youngs (Art), Norah Zuniga Shaw (ACCAD/Dance) and project advisor Tanya Calamoneri.
@jiarasha
The Industry Columbus Built
@columbuslibrary
Explore the history of vaudeville through the lens of Black performers,
producers, and patrons! Our speakers Yvette Gaskins and Mo'Ment Woods
will be sharing about The Dudley Circuit, which was the first widespread, Black-operated performance circuit that predates the Chitlin Circuit. Join us to learn how The Dudley Circuit made our modern entertainment industry what it is today.
Driving Park Branch
Thursday, May 21 I 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Main Library
Wednesday, May 27 I 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Northside Branch
Wednesday, June 10 J 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Martin Luther King Branch
Thursday, June 25 I 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Lecturer Joyelle Weaver's Pilates Reformer I and II students taught and shared what they learned during the spring semester for their final exam presentations.
@joyelleweaver
MFA Student Shaela Davis selected for Friend of Program 60 Award
The Program 60 team and the College of Arts and Sciences selected MFA Student Shaela Davis for the 2026 Friend of Program 60 Award. This award, its inaugural year, is being granted to five outstanding instructors who were nominated by Program 60 students. Davis was nominated for the award by a student in her Dance 1111: Ballet 1 class.
Davis is a dance artist, educator, and researcher whose work moves between the stage, classroom, and the community. She earned her BFA in Dance Performance with a K–12 Teaching Certification from Towson University, where she performed with the TU Dance Company and choreographed for the 2013 American College Dance Association in Virginia. On scholarship at the American Dance Festival, she appeared in Footprints and in repertory by Abby Zbikowski.
As a performer, Davis has worked with Abby Z and the New Utility, Christopher K. Morgan & Artists, Company E, Full Circle Dance Company, and collaborated with vocalists Thomas Beard and Carolyn Black-Sotir. Her performances have taken her to venues and festivals including Jacob’s Pillow, NY Live Arts, The Kennedy Center, Fusebox Festival, and the 92nd Street Y. Her choreography has been featured in the Baltimore Black Choreographers Festival, Peabody Dance! Festival, and Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. She has also taught at numerous dance institutions across Maryland and Ohio.
Currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at The Ohio State University, Shaela is developing research on social dance practices rooted in her identity as a Jamaican American Black Woman. At Ohio State, her self-choreographed solo Habitual Roots was featured in the Autumn concert Uprising. She performed in Ronald K. Brown’s Four Corners, and served as rehearsal director for its restaging. She is a 2025 recipient of Ohio State Dance’s Semester Funding Initiative Award.
@shaelad.dances
Assistant Professor Alfonso Cervera's research project awarded seed grant
Ohio State's Office of Outreach and Engagement selected Assistant Professor Alfonso Cervera's research project "Transnational Folklórico Exchange: Community-Engaged Knowledge Sharing Between Ohio State and Ballet Folklórico Xochihua," for a seed $10,000 grant. "This year, 12 proposals were selected for funding through the Engaged Scholarship Seed Grant process," says the Office of Outreach and Engagment. "Grants were awarded to support community-engaged research or community-engaged projects, in collaboration with a community partner, that address a specific need or problem within the community."
Cervera (he/él/they/them/elle) holds an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California, Riverside, and is a first-generation Queer Mexican American performer, educator, curator, and activist. His research and specialization as an independent artist, focuses on the conversation between Queerness, Ballet Folklorico, and Afro-Latine social dances in a contemporary auto-biographical embodied experience that he calls Poc-Chuc. Cervera is known for his emerging and inclusive technique Poc-Chuc, which has been described as a linking between "the sociality of the audience with the isolated frigidity of the concert stage...resulting in a world of untethered Mexican modernity." This inclusive dance technique weaves these cultural dances as a pedagogical, technical, and choreographic tool to acknowledge his lived experience, but to also re-imagine his own hybrid queered futurity. Cervera found Poc-Chuc Dance Collective in 2019 at Cornish College of the Arts and has since invited various practitioners and collaborators to co-create works from various localities.
@fonzy110990
Assistant Professor Kym McDaniel receives several awards for her films
Assistant Professor Kym McDaniel recently received several awards for her films, including a Juror Honorable Mention at the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Best of Theme at the West Virginia Short Film Festival, and an award for her presentation on feminist childhood media at the Popular Culture Conference. McDaniel has three films currently on the film festival circuit, with spring screenings at Images Festival Toronto, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Big Muddy Film Festival, Athens International Film + Video Festival, and Adriatikino, among others.
@kymcdaniel
Balanced Body International publishes article by Lecturer Joyelle Weaver
Balanced Body International published the article "Balance and the Systems That Drive It," by Lecturer Joyelle Weaver on April 25, 2026. The piece explores balance in Pilates training through a broader lens that connects movement practice with sensory integration and body awareness. Photos feature current clients and a former student of Weaver when she taught and directed the BalletMET PreProfessional Ballet Training Program.
Read more > 🔗 in bio > click on news
@joyelleweaver
MFA Student Shaela Davis and Professor Momar Ndiaye on the incoming cohort of the 2026-27 Society of Fellows Faculty and Graduate Team Fellows
The Global Arts + Humanities announced MFA Student Shaela Davis and Professor Momar Ndiaye as part of their 2026-27 Society of Fellows Faculty and Graduate Team Fellows awards. "The Society of Fellows fosters a multidisciplinary community of faculty, undergraduate and graduate students that support the synthesis and translation of knowledge across disciplines to engage critical societal challenges in the form of an annual theme," says Global Arts + Humanities. "The theme for the 2026-27 Society of Fellows seminar is Cultures in Motion."
Read more 🔗 in bio > click on news
@shaelad.dances
BFA Student Lindsey Beatty presents her research at the Spring Undergraduate Research Festival
Under the mentorship of faculty advisors Dr. Hannah Kosstrin and Eddie Taketa, BFA Student Lindsey Beatty presented her research, "FIGS (Feminal InGlorius Surrender) An Embodied Study of Personal and Collective Reclamation" at the Spring Undergraduate Research Festival on Tuesday, April 7, 2026 in Ohio Union Performance Hall. The annual Spring Undergraduate Research Festival is a research poster forum for students to share their mentored research projects with the broader academic community.
@lindseymbeatty
MFA Student Celia Benvenutti Receives OSU’s Graduate Award in Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts
MFA student Celia Benvenutti is the recipient of this year’s Graduate Award in Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts from The Ohio State University’s Center for the Study of Religion. The award supports her research project, "The Bámbula Effect: Circular Sacred Movement in Bomba and Orisha Dance," which investigates dance as a site of sacred knowledge through the embodied practices of Puerto Rican Bomba and Orisha dance traditions from Cuba and Brazil.
The award recognizes graduate students whose research examines religious and spiritual dynamics, relationships, histories, and symbols. This year’s applicants were invited to explore the relationship between artistic practice and religion/spirituality, and to consider the broader role of art within these domains.
Celia Benvenutti is an Afro-Puerto Rican dance artist, native Detroiter and certified Dunham technique instructor.
She has been studying dance for 30 years under the tutelage of master teacher and certified Dunham technique instructor Penny Godboldo, former head of the dance department at Marygrove College in Detroit, MI. Benvenutti’s background includes extensive training in the Dunham Technique, classical ballet, Horton, Graham, jazz, traditional African, and Afro-Caribbean folklore. Celia was a principal dancer in Taurus Broadhurst Dance, a Contemporary African Company in Washington D.C. from 2012-2016.
In 2020, she was awarded the Gilda Snowden Emerging Artist Award for dance and choreography through the Kresge Foundation.
She is a member of Ricanstruction, a Detroit Puerto Rican folkloric dance troupe. Celia was an adjunct faculty at Wayne State University and a teaching artist for Living Arts, a nonprofit arts organization in the heart of Southwest Detroit.
She is in her second year of her MFA in Dance at the Ohio State University. Her artistic goals focus on facilitating and encouraging liberation of the mind, body, and spirit through black dance.
@nowwatchmerumba
PhD Student Zihao Yuan received an honorable mention for the arts at the Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum on March 6th, 2026 for his oral presentation, "Recentering the Cultural & Gender Identities of Queer Chinese Diasporic Dancers through Hybridization in the U.S.”
The Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research Forum (formerly the Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum) showcases the innovative and exemplary research being conducted by Ohio State graduate students and postdoctoral scholars across the full range of graduate degree programs and research topics and facilitates fruitful exchanges between graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, the administration, and the public.
Zihao子豪 Yuan is a Seattle-based "Kuer 酷儿" (or queer) Chinese dance artist-scholar. He is also a first-year PhD student/Graduate Fellow in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University, pursuing a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from the Shanghai Theatre Academy (2016) and a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Washington (2024).
