Roundtable Speakers

Frances Koncan (she/they) is an Anishinaabe and Slovene playwright currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia, within the shared, unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Originally from Couchiching First Nation, they grew up on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba and attended the University of Manitoba (BA Psychology) and the City University of New York Brooklyn College (MFA Playwriting). They are currently Assistant Professor of Playwriting at the University of British Columbia. Select plays include: Women of the Fur Trade, Space Girl, and zahgidiwin/love.

Amanda Reid is an Assistant Professor of Theatre, Dance, and Performance at Yale University. She is a dance historian who writes and teaches about queer of color critique, West Indian migration, and post-colonial Caribbean Black radicalism. Her current manuscript project, Smaddification: Dance and Decolonization in the West Indies (forthcoming, Duke University Press), explores maximalist queer diaspora aesthetics in Jamaican concert dance to theorize West Indian regional visions of blackness, bodily freedom, and cultural autonomy. Her writing can be found in Theatre Journal and The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies (OUP, forthcoming). Prior to working at Yale, Amanda was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and Lecturer in Stanford University's Theatre and Performance Studies department (2020-2022). She received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Michigan.

meLê yamomo has lived in Lucena City, Los Baños, Manila, Seoul, Bangkok, Warwick, and Munich, and currently resides between Amsterdam and Berlin. He is an Assistant Professor of New Dramaturgies, Media Cultures, Artistic Research, and Decoloniality at the University of Amsterdam, a member of the Amsterdam Young Academy, and author of Sounding Modernities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is the project leader and principal investigator of the EU-JPICH project Decolonizing Southeast Asian Archives (DeCoSEAS), and the Dutch Research Council project »Sonic Entanglements«. meLê is the fourth winner of the Open Ear Award, the most prestigious composer prize in the Netherlands, and one of the 2020 KNAW Early Career Awardees by the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a resident artist at Theater Ballhaus Naunynstrasse where his creations Echoing Europe, sonus, and Forces of Overtones are on repertoire. meLê curates the Decolonial Frequencies Festival and hosts/produces the Sonic Entanglements podcast. In his works as artist-scholar, meLê engages the topics of sonic migrations, queer aesthetics, and post/de-colonial acoustemologies.

Melissa Blanco Borelli is Associate Professor in the Theatre Department and Director of the Dance Program at Northwestern University. Her research interests include embodied identity, popular dance on screen, Blackness in Latin America and performative writing. She is the author of She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body (OUP, awarded best book in Dance Studies by the Dance Studies Association 2016), the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Dance and the Popular Screen (2014), and is currently finishing a book manuscript on dance, theater and archives in contemporary Colombia.