News/Research

Alum Naomi Bragin Receives NEH Summer Stipend

07 May, 2019

Alum Naomi Bragin Receives NEH Summer Stipend

Congratulations to alum Naomi Bragin (Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies) on being awarded a stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities! The NEH aims to support research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.

The NEH is awarding Naomi with a stipend to support her in writing her work "An Ethnographic Cultural History of Streetdance since 1970." The project is described as, "A book-length historical and ethnographic study of hip-hop dance in California from the 1970's to the present."

Congratulations Naomi!

Naomi is a streetdancer, performance artist, scholar and educator. She teaches courses in performance studies, critical race and gender studies and dance, as assistant professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, University of Washington Bothell. Her writing has won awards from The Drama Review, Congress on Research in Dance, and American Society for Theatre Research. She is a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and a Society of Scholars Fellow at University of Washington's Simpson Center for Humanities.​

Her research is published in The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Tropics of Meta, Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies and forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance. Her current manuscript Black Power of Hip Hop Dance: On Kinethic Politics studies aesthetics of streetdance practices emergent in California during the 1970s funk and disco eras.​

As founding director of DREAM, a nationally touring streetdance company sponsored by Oakland's Destiny Arts Center, she was a NYC Hip Hop Theater Festival Future Aesthetics Artist and received support from Creative Work Fund, East Bay Community Foundation, Zellerbach Foundation and People United for a Better Oakland. Full Circle, an exploration of hip hop and Cuban rumba, was a finalist for the Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Best Choreography. ​

Little Brown Language is her new performance research project, showing at On The Boards Northwest New Works Festival in June 2019. I've recently performed at On The Boards Solo: A Festival of Dance and Base Experimental Arts 12 Minutes Max. She facilitates a monthly creative process group for Seattle performance artists called con'spirar: a folxart salon.

Read more here.