Janice Ross, Ph.D.

Janice Ross, Director, Dance Division, Associate Professor (teaching), Drama Department, Stanford University, has a BA from UC Berkeley and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford. Her books include Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education (University of Wisconsin Press 2000), Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (University of California Press 2007), and San Francisco Ballet: An American Voice in Ballet (Chronicle Books 2007).

Her research interests include contemporary performance as activism and dance in prisons. Her essays on dance have been published in several anthologies including Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, edited by Naomi Jackson (Scarecrow Press 2008), Performance and Ritual, edited by Mark Franco (Routledge 2007), Everything Was Possible (Re) Inventing Dance in the 1960s, edited by Sally Banes (University of Wisconsin Press 2003), "Improvisation as Child's Play," in Caught by Surprise: Essays on Art and Improvisation, edited by Ann Cooper Albright and David Gere (Wesleyan University Press 2003).

Her awards include a Stanford Humanities Center Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as research grants from the Iris Litt Fund of the Clayman Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture the Peninsula Community Foundation and The de la Torre Bueno 2008 Special Citation for Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance.

For ten years she was the staff dance critic for The Oakland Tribune and for twenty years a contributing editor to Dance Magazine. Her articles on dance have appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. She is past president of the Dance Critics Association, and the CORD board of directors and current President of the Society of Dance History Scholars.

Office: Roble Gym & Dance Studio, Room 10
Phone (Office): 650 725-0735
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