Dena Davida
Dena Davida (b.1949) was raised in the United States by a family of artists of Jewish and Eastern European heritage, and has been an active participant in the contemporary dance community since 1970. An artivist dancer and curator living in Montreal, she is also an ethnographic researcher, community and university teacher, choreographer and performer, Contact Improvisor practitioner, book and journal editor and indexer.
She earned a B.A. in Theater and Dance at the University of California at Irvine (1970), her M.A. at Wesleyan University in Dance Studies (1995) and was certified in Laban Movement Analysis by the Laban Institute (1996). She completed a doctorate in the Programme d’études at UQÀM et pratiques des arts with an ethnographic study of meaning in the Luna contemporary dance event of O Vertigo dance (2006). She taught creative dance pedagogy to elementary and high school teachers through the University of Sherbrooke (1996-2003), and improvisation, composition, dance aesthetics and anthropology as a chargée de cours in the Dance Department at UQÀM (1985-2007).
As a dance performer, improvisor and choreographer, she created the all female Catpoto Dance Collective (1977-1980), several choreographies with a feminist perspective and aesthetic, interpreted a dozen works by Montréal chorégraphers, and was a player in Tino Seghal’s “This Situation.”
In her role as dance curator, she co-founded Québec’s first dance presenting space Tangente (1980-2019), and co-founded the Festival international de la nouvelle danse de Montréal where she was programmer and education director (1985-2001).
She writes extensively on dance and culture and her essays and conference papers have been published in various magazines, journals and anthologies. She conceived and co-edited the anthologies Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the worlds of dance (2012) and Curating Live Arts: Critical perspectives, essays and conversations in theory and practice (2018).
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