JOSELLI DEANS

Joselli Audain Deans (she, her) is currently an Associate Professor in the School of Dance. Originally from Brooklyn, NY, she is a first generation Haitian American. She joined the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) ballet company after receiving most of her training at the company’s school. During her career with DTH she worked with noted dance personalities such as Agnes de Mille, Frederic Franklin, David Gordon, Louis Johnson, Billy Wilson and Arthur Mitchell. She performed in repertory styles, from Romanticism to contemporary dance. A scholar and an artist, she holds a Doctorate in Dance Education from Temple University. Her work has been published in academic and popular dance publications.

Deans has taught dance technique at Philadanco and several academic institutions including Bryn Mawr College, Eastern University, and Temple University. She presented her work at scholarly conferences and institutions, including the International Association of Blacks in Dance, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Corps de Ballet International, University of Georgia, Temple University, and Collegium for African Diaspora Dance. As a consultant for several institutions and projects, she worked with DTH, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, School of American Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Charlotte Ballet, the Dance Oral History Project for NYPL, and the documentary Black Ballerina. Her work also includes being a member of the design and facilitation team for the Equity Project: Increasing the Presence of Blacks in Ballet from 2018 that concluded in 2020.  She is a Mellon-funded Transformative Intersectional Collective (TRIC) grant member housed in the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah. She was awarded a grant from the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts to co-host a colloquium focusing on the production and editing of an anthology about the Dance Theatre of Harlem with Thomas DeFrantz, Ph.D. and Kimberleigh Jordan, Ph.D.