Department Faculty - Dance

Joyce Morgenroth

Joyce Morgenroth is professor of dance at Cornell University. She began her dance training at the School of American Ballet before majoring in theoretical mathematics at Cornell University and getting an MA in French literature from The Johns Hopkins University. She has choreographed and taught since 1969 and has given improvisation workshops in the USA, Canada, and Europe. Her first book, Dance Improvisations, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, was the main selection of the Dance Book Club that year and has been in print continuously since publication. She has also taught at City University of New York, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Dartmouth College as well as in professional studios in New York, New Haven, and Boston.
After choreographing and performing in New York's downtown scene for five years, she returned to Cornell in 1977 to teach modern dance technique and composition. Since then she has also taught anatomy and physiology, courses in dance history and theory, improvisation, and writing about dance. For several years she was the director of the university-wide interdisciplinary course Mind & Memory: Explorations of Creativity in the Arts and Sciences.
Her recent book, Speaking of Dance: Twelve Contemporary Choreographers on Their Craft, published by Routledge in 2004, reveals the creative process of some of America’s most innovative choreographers.

Joyce Morgenroth will give a workshop on video space for dance at the Society for Dance History Scholars that will take place at Stanford University June 19-22, 2009.