Mark Franko
© Cynthia Fischer

Dance historian, choreographer, dancer and professor, Mark Franko’s books include Martha Graham In Love and War: The Life In the Work (Oxford University Press, 2012), Excursion for Miracles: Paul Sanasardo, Donya Feuer, and Studio for Dance (Wesleyan, 2005), The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Indiana University Press, 1995), which received the de la Torre Bueno Prize, Special Mention in 1996, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge University Press, 1993), and The Dancing Body in Renaissance Choreography (Summa, 1986). Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body also appears in French and Italian translation. The editor of Dance Research Journal and also editor of the Oxford Studies in Dance Theory book series, he has edited two anthologies: Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2006) and Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines (Wesleyan University Press, 2000).

Franko has received the Outstanding Scholarly Research in Dance Award (2011) from the Congress on Research in Dance, and several research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. His choreography — supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harkness Foundation for Dance and the Zellerbach Family Fund — has been featured at venues and festivals such as Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, the Berlin Werkstatt Festival (Germany), the Getty Center, the Montpellier Opera (France), Toulon Art Museum (France), Akademie der Künste (Berlin, Germany), as well as several others in New York and San Francisco.

Currently, Franko is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he also directs the Center for Visual and Performance Studies. He will be joining the dance faculty at Temple University in 2013.