PPP Fridays@2: Artist Talk with Dr. Tara Aisha Willis

About the Event

Guided by her simultaneous practices as a writer, curator and dancer, Tara Aisha Willis discusses her career path, current projects and the structuring devices of her work across various platforms: all attending to the specificities of live, movement-driven performance in programming and on the page. Willis’s academic research explores the lineages and practices of Black experimentation and improvisation in dance through contemporary performances and archival thinking, using dance historical context, frameworks from Black studies and performance theory and explorations embedded in her creative practices as curator and dancer. Among the projects discussed will be Indescribable Moves: Improvised Experiments in Dancing Blackness, her scholarly book in development, which points to the intricacy and changeability of both dance and race in performances by choreographers Bebe Miller, Ishmael Houston-Jones and Ralph Lemon, as well as Will Rawls: one for which Willis served as curator and the other in which she performed. Touching on her more experimental forthcoming book projects—one on artist taisha paggett (Soberscove Press) and one on Willis's 2025 Ephemeral Organ performance festival (Wendy's Subway/EMPAC)—and other upcoming projects, she discusses how improvisation, structure/scores and language operate throughout her practice. 

About Tara Aisha Willis

Tara Aisha Willis’s research centers Black living and experimentation. Currently Curator of Dance & Theater at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, she belongs to the “Bessie” Award-winning Skeleton Architecture improvisation collective and is co-editor of the forthcoming artist book, horizontal plane: taisha paggett performance works (Soberscove) and Marking the Occasion (Wendy’s Subway, 2021). She holds a doctorate from NYU’s Performances Studies department and has conducted research fellowships at Getty Research Institute, NYPL for the Performing Arts, University of Indiana-Bloomington, University of London and Jacob’s Pillow. Her writing has been published by Getty, CARA, Danspace Project, Center for Book Arts, liquid blackness, Black Scholar, Women & Performance, Performance Research, Brooklyn Rail and MRPJ. She has performed for artists like Will Rawls, Yanira Castro, Anna Sperber, Kim Brandt, devynn emory and Paulina Olowska, collaborated with Damon Locks and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste.