Ph.D. Candidate Tara Aisha Willis was recently profiled in the Chicago Tribune's Arts & Entertainment section. Tara discusses how her work in the Department of Performance Studies and around New York City prepared her for her current position as the Associate Curator of Performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
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Tara Aisha Willis received her B.A. from Barnard College where she majored in Dance and English, with a concentration in creative writing (summa cum laude, phi beta kappa, Centennial Scholar). There she studied black embodiment in both literature and dance studies, alongside her own dance and poetry practices. She earned her M.A. in Performance Studies at NYU, writing about black tactics of ambiguity and destabilization in recent dance experimentation and the invisibilization of racial dynamics in New York's experimental dance communities. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at NYU.