Crystal U. Davis
By School of Performing Arts
Crystal U. Davis is a dancer, educator, movement analyst, and critical race theorist with over twenty years of experience teaching dance and supervising dance educators in P-12
education. Her work has been published in the Journal of Dance Education, in the Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, and in her book, Dance and Belonging: Implicit Bias and Inclusion in Dance Education. She obtained her B.A. in Comparative Religion from Emory University with a minor
in Dance, her M.F.A in Dance from Texas Woman’s University, an M.A. in Performance
Studies from New York University, and a C.L.M.A. from Integrated Movement Studies.
Her professional experience spans working as an aesthetic education teaching artist
at the Lincoln Center Institute to leading professional development workshops at schools
and organizations in the U.S. and abroad to consulting state departments of education
and dance organizations about bias in their evaluative rubrics. Ms. Davis’ dance performances
include East Indian dance forms, West African dance forms, and her own postmodern
choreography that examines the incongruities between what we say we believe and what
we do.
She is an Associate Professor of Dance Performance and Scholarship at the University
of Maryland, College Park where she is Head of Dance Performance and Scholarship and teaches anti-racist pedagogy for
dance and theater courses, modern dance technique, somatics, and movement analysis.
