Tara Aisha Willis with Gillian Jakab

Tara Aisha Willis is a dancer, writer, and Curator in Performance & Public Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. Willis has held editorial positions for Women & Performance and TDR/The Drama Review, and co-edited with Thomas F. DeFrantz a special issue of The Black Scholar. Other writings appear in Movement Research Performance Journal, the Brooklyn Rail, and Performa Magazine, among others. Willis performed in a collaboration between Will Rawls and Claudia Rankine, and recently in works by Kim Brandt, Megan Byrne, and Yanira Castro. She danced in the 2016 “Bessie” award-winning performance by The Skeleton Architecture.

Dance editor of the Brooklyn Rail Gillian Jakab is also associate editor of Gagosian Quarterly. Her writing on dance and other topics has appeared in these publications, among others. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and a MA from Columbia University. She was raised and lives in Brooklyn.