Hannah Schwadron

Hannah Schwadron, MFA, Ph.D teaches dance history, cultural politics, improvisation and performance at the undergraduate and graduate level and directs the Arts in NYC semester program, which brings students to New York City for sixteen weeks of interlocking coursework, mentored arts administrative internship, and engagement with arts professionals across the five boroughs. 

Schwadron’s creative and scholarly research focuses on Jewishness, dance, humor and migration studies. Dancing and writing on these themes led to her first book, The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender and Jewish Joke-work in US Pop Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the de la Torre Bueno Award for Best First Book from Dance Studies Association. Her second book, co-edited with Marta E. Savigliano, Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) is the first volume on the subfield of dance humor and includes ten essays, including her own on “Dancing Displa(y)cement” with Berlin-based youth migrant ensemble, Al-Hakawati. 

Schwadron’s writing has also been published in Choreographic Practices, The International Journal of Screendance, Shofar, PARtake Journal, Liminalities, AJS Perspectives, Dancer Citizen, and InDance, and included in anthology/volume collections Dance and American Perspectives, Eds. Jen Atkins, Sally Sommer, and Tricia Young (University of Florida Press, 2018), Oxford Handbooks Online in Music, Ed. Alexander Rehding (2017), Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, Eds. Rebekah J. Kowal, Gerald Siegmund and the late Randy Martin (2017), and Oxford Handbook in Jewishness and Dance, Eds. Naomi M. Jackson, Rebecca Pappas, and Toni Shapiro-Phim (2022). 

As part of ongoing theory-practice research, Hannah curates Field Studies (NYC, Oakland, Tallahassee, and Berlin), a creative development lab that allows performer-writers the space to workshop new projects with live audiences and peer review. Creating platforms for creative exchange has been core to Schwadron’s twenty plus years in dance/storytelling/education and is central to the ways her work intersects writing and performance. 

Her collaborative dance film Klasse (2015), made with FSU Associate Professor of Communication Malia Bruker and a cast of middle school students in Hamburg, Germany, continues to be part of Holocaust education and community engagement programming and won the Production Grant from Dance Film Association (NYC), and has been shown at American Dance Festival (Durham and Boone), Antimatter [Media Art] (Victoria, BC), Tiny Dance Film Fest (SF), Israelitische Töchterschule (Hamburg), Third Coast Dance Film Festival (Houston), where it won the Spirit of the Festival award, and ScreenDance Miami, where it won the Audience Choice award.

Outside of school, Schwadron serves as Vice President of Membership and Development of Dance Studies Association (2023-present), and is active board member of Ayoka Afrikan Drum and Dance and the Tallahassee Bail Fund, a grassroots organization that pays bail for people who cannot afford it and assists access to transportation, education, employment, and other needed resources upon release. She offers movement classes at the Leon County Youth Detention Center and is a certified instructor and committed practitioner of yoga.