Dena Davida

Dena Davida has practiced contemporary dance for 55 years as a performer, teacher, researcher and curator.  A Californian who immigrated to Montréal in 1977, she participated in the “second generation” of contact improvisers, taught Nikolais dance technique and Laban-based creative movement for children (becoming a Certified Movement Analyst).  She co-founded and was the curator Montréal’s first dance performance organization Tangente from 1980 - 2019.  She was also co-founder of the Festival international de nouvelle danse de Montréal where she initiated educational programmes.  She taught dance improvisation and composition, Laban Movement Analysis, dance aesthetics and anthropology as a chargée de cours at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) for over 25 years.  Her essays and research articles have been published in numerous magazines and journals. In her twenties she completed a B.A. in theatre with a dance minor at the University of California at Riverside and Irvine, in her thirties an M.A. in Movement Studies from Wesleyan University. At age 57, she completed the doctoral Programme d’études et pratiques des arts at UQÀM with an ethnographic study of meaning in “contemporary dance events” (a case study and analysis of O Vertigo Danse’s Luna choreographic project).  Her recent publications: a chapter on the founding Montréal university dance programmes in Renegade Bodies: Canadian Dance in the 1970s, and an international anthology on artistic dance ethnography, for which she was editor, with 28 dancer-researchers: Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the worlds of dance. In 2014, she initiated a long-term project to develop the theory and practice of performing arts curation with a website, an international symposium (see cica-icac.org), a seminal master’s level seminar in the Museum Studies Department of UQÀM, and the publication of Curating Live Arts: Global perspectives, essays and conversations on theory and practice.
She is currently developing a new journal, Viva: A journal of live arts curation, and several classes and symposia in this burgeoning field of study.
Phone: 1-514-688-2098
Address: 195, rue Osborne
St-Lambert, Québec
Canada J4R 1B3