On this episode of My Time, My Life, I interview Dr. Melissa Blanco Borelli, Associate Professor of of Theatre and the Director of the Dance Program at Northwestern University. We discuss topics ranging from her being a first generation immigrant, to her living abroad, to risk taking in her career, and her choice to not have children, and much more.

Dr. Borelli is a critical dance studies scholar, choreographer, and cultural critic. She has been on faculty at MIT, University of Surrey (UK), Royal Holloway, University of London (UK) and the University of Maryland, College Park.As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research interests are broad. They include Blackness in Latin America, critical dance studies, performative writing, popular dance on screen, Black performance theory, (Black) feminist (auto)ethnography, historiography, archives, and the digital humanities.

She is the author of She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body which won the Dance Studies Association’s De la Torre Bueno Prize® for best book in dance studies in 2016. She is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (2014).Dr. Borelli is affiliated faculty in Performance Studies at Northwestern, she is a polyglot (6 languages), plays the piano, and loves to run.You can read more about Dr. Borelli here and find her books here.