Balancing Dance and Academia with Bhumi B Patel
Episode 199: Show Notes
Dance is a beautiful medium to honor the past while building community in the present. Today, we are joined by Bhumi Patel of Patel Dance Works to discuss her illustrious career. In this episode, you’ll hear all about Bhumi’s life, her creative interests, her college education at a women’s liberal arts institution, her love for constant learning and education, and so much more! We delve into her MFA experience and working through injury before discussing her dissertation on how queer of color performance is informed by improvisational practice and the ‘ghosts’ of the past. She even tells us about getting her Ph.D. during COVID, what her research was about, and how she managed to finish it in just four years. Lastly, Bhumi tells us how she plans on expanding her dissertation work into a book and what else we can expect from her in the future. From her master’s thesis encompassing the upheaval after World War Two, to her deep love for dance writing, Bhumi’s talents, interests, and achievements are fascinating! This is a conversation you don’t want to miss, so be sure to tune in now!
Key Points From This Episode:
- Introducing Bhumi Patel to the show.
- How she became interested in dance, and why she chose a women’s college.
- What inspired Bhumi to pursue a career in dance during her undergrad.
- Bhumi tells us about her master’s thesis on Anna Sokolow’s Rooms.
- What kept drawing Bhumi back into an academic setting.
- Bhumi’s experience doing her MFA at Mills College and her focus on grief.
- Her dissertation on how queer of color performance is informed by improvisation.
- How she advocated for change through writing and starting her dance company.
- Bhumi tells us about the content of her Ph.D. and her determination to finish it fast.
- What she plans to do with her research and her plans for the future.
Dr. Bhumi B Patel is a queer home-seeker and science fiction choreographer, director of pateldanceworks, and scholar/writer. In its purest form, she creates performances as a love letter to her ancestors. Bhumi earned her PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, her MFA in Dance from Mills College, and her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University. Patel is a member of Dancing Around Race, founded by Gerald Casel, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and written publications. Patel’s work has been presented at Movement Research (NY), The Asia Pacific Dance Festival (Manoa, Hawai’i), Urban Arts Space (Columbus, OH), Human Resources (LA), CounterPulse (SF), Joe Goode Annex (SF), RoundAntennae (Berkeley), SAFEhouse Arts (SF), max10 (Santa Cruz), RAWdance’s Concept Series (SF), The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest (SF), Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival (Berkeley), and Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency (SF). Bhumi has been a Lead Artist with SAFEhouse Arts, an Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow, and a Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow. Her research has been presented at Dance Studies Association, Performance Studies international, the Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, the National Women’s Studies Association, the Popular Culture Association, the International Conference on Movement and Computing and other symposia. Patel has been published in Performance Research Journal, Refractions Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance. Her co-authored essay, “Locating Popular Dance and Dance in Popular Culture” and case study essays “Gender Is a Drag: Performing Hybridity on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Maxi Challenge ‘Prancing with the Queens’” and “‘To Exist is to Survive Unfair Choices’: The OA and Queer Acts of Protest” appear in Dance in US Popular Culture edited By Jennifer Atkins. Patel has a forthcoming essay on performing futurisms in The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology. Patel serves as Editorial Assistant for Choreographic Practices. Bhumi was a 2022-2023 Dance/USA Fellow and a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Making art is her way of tracing the deeply woven connections in which we live–past, present, future–as a way to build communities of nourishment and care.
Patel Dance Works
Release Date: 4.23.26
Release Date: 4.9.26