Tria Blu Wakpa joins UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance Faculty
Tria’s appointment as assistant professor in dance studies is effective July 1, 2018.
The UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture is pleased to announce the appointment of Tria Blu Wakpa as assistant professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance (WACD). Tria’s appointment is effective July 1, 2018.
Tria is a scholar and practitioner of Indigenous contemporary dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous sign language), martial arts, and yoga. Her research combines community-based, Indigenous and feminist methodologies with critical race theories to examine the politics and practices of dance and embodiment historically and contemporarily in educational and carceral institutions for Indigenous peoples.
Tria’s book project, titled Native American Embodiment: Fixing, Eclipsing, and Liberating in Educational and Carceral Contexts, investigates the relationships between embodied and educational programming (including dance, theatrical productions, basketball, gardening, and yoga) at two institutions located on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota: St. Francis Mission School, a former on-reservation boarding school (1888–1972), and Wanbli Wiconi Tipi (Eagle Life Home), the tribal juvenile detention center founded in 2005. She has published articles in The American Indian Culture and Research Journal and Dance Research Journal, and has served as a guest editor for special issue journals that feature writing by people who are imprisoned. Tria has received major fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues. She is currently a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Dance at UC Riverside.
Since 2010, Tria has taught interdisciplinary and community-engaged courses at public, private, tribal, and carceral institutions including UC Berkeley, San Diego State University, University of San Francisco, Sinte Gleska University, and San Quentin State Prison. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in ethnic studies from UC Berkeley and an M.F.A. in creative writing from San Diego State University.
“We could not be more excited to have Tria joining our department and the UCLA faculty,” said Lionel Popkin, chair of the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. “Tria’s study of the changing conceptions of how Native American bodies are reflected in practices of both Native American and U.S. governmental agencies from the early 20th century to the present will open up new and powerful paradigms within the field of dance studies. She brings a personalized sense of how movement lives within the body, even as the forces of colonization impact its visibility.”
“I am thrilled to join the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. Many of my long-standing dedications are central to the department’s commitments,” said Tria. At UCLA, Blu Wakpa will teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in dance studies while continuing her own research and artistic practice. “With its inspiring faculty and students, WACD is the perfect place to continue to build mutually beneficial relationships between the academy and Native peoples; to publish scholarship that examines dance and embodiment in educational and carceral contexts; to create activist performance and poetry; to teach courses that explore the intersections of embodiment, race, class, gender, culture, and tribal sovereignty; and to strengthen the Race and Yoga initiative and journal I co-founded and co-facilitate. I look forward to connecting more with the WACD and larger UCLA communities and collaborating with those whose work likewise interrogates how social structures influence material interactions and strives to promote a more just world.”
Photo Credit: Kristine T. Pham
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