- patelbb@uwm.edu
- She / They
Directory Categories
Bhumi B. Patel
- Lecturer, Dance
Education
- PhD Dance Studies Ohio State University
- MFA Dance: Performance and Choreography Mills College
- MA American Dance Studies Florida State University
Biography
Dr. Bhumi B Patel is a queer home-seeker and science fiction choreographer, director of pateldanceworks, and scholar/writer. In its purest form, she creates performances as a love letter to her ancestors. Bhumi earned her PhD in Dance Studies from The Ohio State University, her MFA in Dance from Mills College, and her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University. Patel is a member of Dancing Around Race, founded by Gerald Casel, and engages with curatorial practices for both performances and written publications. Patel’s work has been presented at Movement Research (NY), The Asia Pacific Dance Festival (Manoa, Hawai’i), Urban Arts Space (Columbus, OH), Human Resources (LA), CounterPulse (SF), Joe Goode Annex (SF), RoundAntennae (Berkeley), SAFEhouse Arts (SF), max10 (Santa Cruz), RAWdance's Concept Series (SF), The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest (SF), Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival (Berkeley), and Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency (SF). Bhumi has been a Lead Artist with SAFEhouse Arts, an Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow, and a Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow. Her research has been presented at Dance Studies Association, Performance Studies international, the Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference, the National Women's Studies Association, the Popular Culture Association, the International Conference on Movement and Computing and other symposia. Patel has been published in Performance Research Journal, Refractions Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance. Her co-authored essay, “Locating Popular Dance and Dance in Popular Culture” and case study essays “Gender Is a Drag: Performing Hybridity on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Maxi Challenge ‘Prancing with the Queens’” and “‘To Exist is to Survive Unfair Choices’: The OA and Queer Acts of Protest” appear in Dance in US Popular Culture edited By Jennifer Atkins. Patel has a forthcoming essay on performing futurisms in The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technology. Patel serves as Editorial Assistant for Choreographic Practices. Bhumi was a 2022-2023 Dance/USA Fellow and a 2023 YBCA 100 Honoree. Making art is her way of tracing the deeply woven connections in which we live–past, present, future–as a way to build communities of nourishment and care.