Tara Aisha Willis with Gillian Jakab

Dancer Tara Aisha Willis and the Rail’s Dance editor Gillian Jakab discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.

Tara Aisha Willis is a dancer and a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. She is Associate Curator in Performance & Public Practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

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, Magazin im August, Voices from the Bush, Dancing Platform Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches, and Downtown Dance, Performance Research, and Performa Magazine. 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.

Gillian Jakab is the Dance editor at the Brooklyn Rail, and an assistant editor at Gagosian Quarterly. Her writing focuses on the intersection of dance with just about anything else.

In the Rail:

• OKWUI OKPOKWASILI with Tara Aisha Willis (March 2020)
• Urgent Tomorrows (Oct 2015)

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.