Nora Raine Thompson (she/her) is a performance writer, dance-maker, performer, and arts administrator. She graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in Dance and Science in Society (combining studies in Psychology and Sociology) and is a current M.A. candidate in Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She works as Grants Manager at Danspace Project, and worked previously for Abrons Arts Center and Eiko Otake. She dances and writes to research what her body already knows, dissect and swallow contradictions.

Why PS @ NYU?

I was searching for a place where I could grapple with my questions about the avowed potentials of improvisational dance practices. I want to look closer at the risks of chasing freedom through movement and the impacts of a rhetoric of the possibility of neutral, empty bodies. I felt that NYU PS would be the right place to pursue these ideas further while expanding my approaches to research, incorporating studies of critical race theory, disability studies, and fat studies into my process in order to better interrogate my own positionality.