Hannah Schwadron (MFA, PhD) is Associate Professor of Dance at Florida State University where she teaches the cultural politics of performance and directs the Arts in NYC semester program.

Her creative research engages dance as change-making site of experimentation and exchange, which she explores through this inaugural AATI research fellowship alongside a team of student researchers in a series of community-building movement workshops within a Tallahassee youth detention center.

Inviting a team of FSU School of Dance and UROP participants to learn and develop her ‘Structures for Change” movement repertoire and cofacilitation approach, Schwadron leads a creative research and mentored teaching opportunity that asks all involved to see themselves as active change-making agents whose shared insights reshape the environment and their own relationship to it. In energizing circles versus lines, movement workshops engage dance tools for group connection and creative problem solving, breathing sweaty, full-bodied life into carceral classrooms where student researchers, incarcerated youth participants, and participating detention center educators and correctional officers emphasize teamwork, adaptability, and shared leadership skills.

Core member and cofounder of the Tallahassee Bail Fund since 2020, Hannah engages direct action as a dance site, too, where the work of posting bail for people who cannot afford it is a “Structure for Change” in its own right, and a practice of moving in partnership with people to access needed services upon release. Underscoring dancer training as preparation for this work, Schwadron’s recent chapter “Improvising hope” in Critical University Studies (Vanderbilt Press, 2026), makes the tie explicit between movement practice and civic engagement more broadly.

Schwadron is also author of The Case of the Sexy Jewess: Dance, Gender, and Jewish Jokework (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the de la Torre Bueno Award for Best First Book, and coeditor of Funny Moves: Dance Humor Politics (OUP 2025) along with Marta E. Savigliano, featuring ten original essays from Pakistan, Argentina, Germany, Trinidad, and the US/Mexico border, including her own on the subject of anti-colonial humor within a youth refugee theater ensemble in Berlin. Additional essays appear in Shofar, Liminalities, PARtake Journal, Choreographic Practices, Dancer Citizen, In Dance Magazine, International Journal of Screendance, American Perspectives in Dance, Oxford Handbook on Jewishness and Dance, Oxford Handbook on Dance and Politics, Oxford Handbook Online in Dance and Music, and most recently, Feminist Studies.

Hannah currently serves as President of Dance Studies Association where she recently launched an Academic Freedom Fellowship and the Dance and Abolition Working Group among other initiatives.