DeVaan, Juliana

Juliana DeVaan is a PhD candidate in United States history at Columbia, where she studies 20th century cultural and intellectual history, with a focus on dance and performance. She cares about integrating dance into broader narratives of history, showing that movement has meaning which affects how we move through the world. Her dissertation in progress, “Grass-Roots Culture: Experimental Dance and Performance in New York, 1970-2000,” explores the relationship between the avant-garde and neoliberalism. 

Her work has been supported by the Lehman Center for American History, the Center for American Studies, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and the New York Public Library. She recently completed an oral history with Toni Basil for the Dance Oral History Project at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Currently, she serves as a rapporteur for the Studies in Dance University Seminar and edits the ongoing multi-disciplinary project Dance Lawyer. 

Juliana holds an MA in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts (2020), where she won the Performance Studies Emerging Scholar award, and a BA in dance and ethnicity and race studies from Columbia (2019), where she won the award for best thesis in the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. She is also a dancer who has performed original works by Donald Byrd, Okwui Okpokwasili, Adrienne Truscott, and Kevin Wynn.