Faculty and Staff
Dr. Joanna McNamara, Dance/Dance Program Coordinator
Department of Music & Dance
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
joann.mcnamara@emich.edu
EMU Dance Majors Left to Right performing Liberty's Garden, 2006: Kristin Frak, Amanda Iannitti, Erik Main-Abbott, Stephanie Schult, and Amy Hansemann. Photo by Brian Hobbs.
Dr. Joanna McNamara, Professor of Dance, is a modern dance choreographer and dance scholar. Professor McNamara holds certifications in beginning and intermediate Labanotation and is also a certified Pilates instructor. Her 2006 premiere, Liberty's Garden , will be performed at American College Dance Festival in Iowa, March 2006, by EMU dancers, Erik Abbott-Main, Adrienne DeGraff Westlake, Kristin Frak, Amy Hansemann, Amanda Iannitti, T.J. La Frambroise, and Stephanie Schult, to music by Michael Daugherty and natural sounds of a Tibetan Monestary. Professor McNamara is also currently working on an experimental piece which will be premiered in June 2006, Michigan. Her site-specific work for 9 dancers, ascenDescend, was recently performed on the staircase at the Kellogg Conference Center in Lansing, Michigan during the National Dance Education Organization Conference. Professor McNamara's current research is on the dancing body and dance metaphor, and she presented a paper on this topic last year at the Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference in San Diego, California. During the past several years, Professor McNamara has taught a variety of courses at EMU, including modern dance, ballet, choreography, repertory, dance history, teaching methods of dance, Pilates, and an interdisciplinary course in the performing arts.. Professor McNamara is also an affiliate faculty member of the EMU Women's Studies Program, where she will be soon be teaching a graduate course on women and dance. As a member of the University Musical Society Advisory Committee, Professor McNamara currently chairs the Entertainment Committee for the 2006 Ford Honors Gala Benefit, a fundraising event for K-12 performing arts education outreach-programs, and slated to host the great Dave Brubeck this May. Professor McNamara continues her training with Camilla and John Chiapuris at Community Ballet in Ann Arbor, and regularly practices Bikram yoga.
Professor McNamara grew up in Southern California, and received a Dean's Scholarship at California Institute of the Arts to train with Gus Solomon's Jr., Donald Byrd and prima ballerina, Mia Slavinska. She went on to train in modern dance with Aaron Osborne in San Francisco, and to perform and present her choreography throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including an evening-length program of her choreography at the former Margaret Jenkins Dance Studio. She completed an MA in Dance at Mills College, and taught modern dance, ballet, and jazz dance at City College of San Francisco and in Bay Area dance studios. She received a Ph.D. in Dance and Related Arts at Texas Woman's University, where she taught modern dance in the major program as a graduate assistant, and performed throughout Texas in the TWU Dance Tour Ensemble. Her research interests are in hermeneutic phenomenology, dance aesthetics and methodology. During Professor McNamara's last year as a doctoral student at TWU she also taught modern dance, jazz, ballet, creative writing, and an interdisciplinary class at Dallas Arts Magnet High School. She has performed with a variety of choreographers and companies including Tance Johnson, Jill Klenota, Tandy Beale and in the reconstruction of Doris Humphrey's Passacaglia with the Utah Repertory Dance Theater. Professor McNamara's interview of dance scholar Ann Daly, appears in Daly's Critical Gestures: Collected Writings on Dance and Culture and her chapter, "Dance in the Hermeneutic Circle," appears in Researching Dance: Evolving Modes of Inquiry (eds. Penelope Hanstein and Sondra Fraleigh), which was favorably reviewed in "Dance Research Journal," (Winter 2001-2002). She has served as dance critic for the Ann Arbor News, has written for Dance Magazine and has presented papers at numerous regional and national conferences, including the National Congress on Research in Dance, National Dance Education Organization, American Dance Guild, and the American Association for Interdisciplinary Studies. Her dance Interfuse (2003) for six EMU dancers, was selected for performance at the National Dance Education Organization. Her choreography has been presented throughout the United States, including California, Texas, Michigan, New Mexico, and also in several different locations in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
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