Biography

Dr. Blanco Borelli joined the Dance, Film and Theatre department in the fall of 2008. Previously, she was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar in the Music and Theatre Arts department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has also taught at UCLA, UC Riverside and Citrus College. She holds a PhD in Dance History and Theory (now Critical Dance Studies) from the University of California, Riverside, an MA in Communications Management from the University of Southern California, and a BA in Music and International Relations from Brown University. Her monograph in progress examines the mulata body through comparative social dance and everyday embodied histories in Havana (and New Orleans) from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. An edited volume on dance, identity and corporeality on popular screens is in progress as well. 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, New York, and Havana, Cuba, and she dances/performs other Latino/Latin American social dance forms: salsa, son, danzon, rumba, tango, cumbia as well as other Colombian folkloric forms. In April 2008, she performed her one-woman show "Mulata Madness" (based on her dissertation research) at MIT and is developing it further for future incarnations. She is also writing a performance and film project on sixteenth century Spanish mulata hermaphrodite Elena/o de Cespedes.

Research Interests

Black and Latino performance, critical dance theory, corporeality/semiotics, dance in film, Latin American film, Latin/o popular dance, global feminisms, popular dance on screen, sacred and social dance forms, Afro-Cuban dance

Award Recipient: American Society for Theatre Research, Targeted Research Area Grant, $3,000

For a brief video about Dr. Blanco Borelli's current research, click here. 

Research Collaborations

Departmental Research Groups: Black Diaspora in the Arts, Performances of the Popular

Member of Black Performance Theory, a working group affiliated with Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Slippage

Member of Choreography and Corporealities Working Group, International Federation on Theatre Research (IFTR/FIRT)

Affiliate Scholar, UC-Cuba Academic Initiative, a University of California multi-campus research program

Publications

Monographs:

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of Mulata Corporeality (in progress)

The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen, editor (forthcoming 2012, Oxford University Press)

Journal Articles, Book Chapters:

"Dance in Music Video, or How I learned to dance like Janet... Miss Jackson" International Journal of Screendance (forthcoming)

"Sexuality: The Mulatta Figure in the Cuban Imaginary" entry in Encyclopedia of Cuba: Culture, History and Society (forthcoming)

"Hip Work: Un-Doing the Tragic Mulata" in Black Performance Theory Anthology, Duke University Press (forthcoming)

"Becomings and Belongings: Lucy Guerin's The Ends of Things" in Brolga: an Australian Journal for Dance, December 2009.

"A Taste for Honey: Choreographing the Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance Film" International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media, Volume 5:2 and 3, December 2009

"Hips, Hipnotism, Hip(g)nosis: The Mulata Performances of Ninon Sevilla" in Routledge Dance Studies Reader, Second Edition (2009)

"Y ahora que vas a hacer, mulata? Hip Choreographies in the Mexican cabaratera film Mulata (1954)" Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory. November 2008. (Honorable Mention, 2008 Gertrude Lippincott Award for Best Article published in the field of Dance Studies, Society of Dance History Scholars)

“El ritmo de la azúcar” in ¡Ay, qué rico! El sexo en la literatura cubana . María Luisa Ochoa, ed., Cádiz: Aduana Vieja, 2005.

Book Reviews:

“Performing Josephine Baker” Josephine Baker in Life: The Image and the Icon by Bennetta Jules-Rossette, Dance Chronicle, November 2008

"There's Black People in England" Black Dance in London, 1730-1850: Innovation, Tradition and Resistance by Rodreguez King-Dorset, Dance Chronicle, 33:1 

"Jayna Brown's Babylon Girls" Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern. Jayna Brown, Hemispheric Institute e-misférica 6.2. To read, click here.

Teaching

HE1: Arts and Society

HE2: Dance, Politics and Identity

HE3: National Forms, Global Forms

HE3: Choreographing Writing

PGT: Culture, Power and Difference

PGT: Research Methodologies

Departmental Duties

HE1 Year Tutor (until January 2011)

Dance, Film and Theatre Department Marketing Representative

Examinations Officer

Affiliations

American Society of Theatre Research (ASTR)

Congress on Research in Dance (CORD), Board Member

Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS), Board Member

Postgraduate Research Supervision Interests

• Black performance/dance practices
• Latino/Latin American (popular) dance
• Corporeality, Feminisms
• Popular Dance and Film

Postgraduate Supervision

Currently principal supervisor to 2 students; co-supervisor to 2 students.

Foreign Languages: Spanish, French, Italian, German

Other interests: travel, music, fitness, surfing, fashion, nutritional health, cooking