Joan Myers Brown and the Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina, 2012 A Biohistory of American Performance

Founder of the Philadelphia Dance Company (PHILADANCO) and the Philadelphia School of Dance Arts, Joan Myers Brown's personal and professional histories reflect the hardships as well as the advances of African-Americans in the artistic and social developments of the second half of the twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries.

Foreword: Ballet Becomes Black Uplift; R.F.Thompson Prelude Prologue The Backdrop: 1920s-1940s Spectacularly Black on Black: 1940s-1950s But Black is Beautiful!: 1950s-1980s 'Nose to the Grindstone, Head to the Stars' The Philadelphia/Philadanco Aesthetic Audacious Hope: The House That Joan Built: 1980s-21st Century Epilogue Afterword: Brenda Dixon Gottschild: A Critical Perspective; A.Chatterjea Joan Myers Brown: Annotated Resume Philadanco Home Seasons Repertory Chronology: 1975-2010 Philadanco Choreographer Profiles Dance Practitioners Mentioned in Text Philadanco Activity Schedule: August 2009-June 2011 Interviewees: 1985, 1988, 2008-09

Author Brenda Dixon Gottschild: Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Waltzing in the Dark, and The Black Dancing Body, is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University, USA, and a former senior consultant and writer for Dance Magazine. She lectures nationally and internationally, using her own dancing/thinking body to illustrate her ideas and blur the division between practice and theory. She is the recipient of the 2013 Scholar Award from the International Association of Blacks in Dance.