Visiting Scholar Lectures

The Visiting Scholar Program brings nationally known scholars to San Francisco Ballet to lecture on a variety of topics that are meant to educate and inspire balletomanes of all levels and ages.

2008 Visiting Scholar, Jennifer Fisher

Jennifer Fisher is an Associate Professor of Dance at University of California Irvine, where she teaches Dance History, Theory, Criticism, and Ethnography. Dr. Fisher earned a Master’s Degree in Dance History and Ethnography from York University in Toronto before receiving her Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside. Having taught both at York University and at Pomona College, Claremont, California, she was for 10 years a regular contributor of dance writing to the Los Angeles Times. Her articles have appeared in many dance publications and scholarly journals. Her book Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World (2003, Yale University Press) won the 2004 Special Citation given by the de la Torre Bueno Prize and the Society of Dance History Scholars.

Lynn Garafola is a Professor of Dance at Barnard College. A dance historian and critic, she is the author of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Legacies of Twentieth-Century Dance, and the editor of several books, including The Diaries of Marius Petipa, Of, By, and For the People: Dancing on the Left in the 1930s, José Limón: An Unfinished Memoir, and The Ballets Russes and Its World. Curator of the New-York Historical Society's exhibition "Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet" and several smaller shows, she is a former Getty Scholar, a recipient of fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and National Endowment for the Humanities, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Editor of the acclaimed book series Studies in Dance History, she has written for Dance Magazine, The Nation, Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.

2006 Visiting Scholar, Deborah Jowitt

Deborah Jowitt has been writing about dance for The Village Voice since 1967.Her selected reviews and essays have been published in two collections: Dance Beat (1977) and The Dance in Mind (1985), as well as in numerous journals. Her third book, Time and the Dancing Image, won the de la Torre Bueno Prize for 1988. In 1997 she edited and wrote the introduction to Meredith Monk (Johns Hopkins University Press). Her Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance was published by Simon & Schuster in 2004. In addition to lecturing and giving workshops in the United States and abroad, she teaches in the Dance Department of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.