Biographies
Naiti Bhatt is a junior at Scripps College majoring in Computer Science and Neuroscience, with a special interest in the intersection of the two: computational neuroscience. She hopes to continue pursuing research applying machine learning techniques to understand the functional dynamics of cognitive processes, like visual adaptation and imitation learning. Naiti enjoys indoor cycling, practicing her latte art, and hiking. As a child, she practiced ballet, but has no formal training in any dance. As an Indian American, she enjoys listening to a variety of diasporic music, especially those within Desi and Arab genres. Her interest in the impact of post-colonial theory as it relates to Orientalism is motivated by the aesthetics and rhythms of this kind of music. Her project relates these ideas to the aesthetics and movement in Bollywood that she has been exposed to and was curious to reflect upon.
Rose Gelfand is a poet, dancer, and scholar from Richmond, California. She's a junior at Scripps College, where she is a sociology major with double minors in feminist, gender, sexuality studies and dance. Rose is a co-captain of Groove Nation Dance Crew, an urban dance crew comprised of students from across the Claremont Colleges, the vice president of Freestylin’ Collective which holds weekly freestyle dance sessions for local dancers, and co-runs a writing workshop/open mic at the Motley Coffeehouse called Snaps. Last year Rose published a series of three original zines, which explore the intersections of fatness, queerness, dance, the internet, sexual violence, desirability politics and embodied experience. She plans to conduct her thesis research next year on the proliferation of dance videos online and how they’re changing dance as an art, industry, and culture. Her interest in hip hop culture and histories brought her to her research topic for this class, which has greatly expanded her understanding of how hip hop is functioning transnationally and within the MENAT region.
Demiana Ibrahim is a freshman at Scripps College and a proud Coptic Egyptian. Her academic interests include music, media studies, anthropology, and English. She is a violinist in the Claremont Concert Orchestra and hopes to expand her knowledge and training of Western music to encompass that of Eastern cultures, especially in a way that honors her Egyptian heritage. In doing so, she hopes for more global appreciation of the soulful melodies of the East. Although she has no formal training in dance, Movement as Culture this semester has deepened her understanding and appreciation of the traditions and relationships that she was familiar with in an informal sense. She certainly hopes to build off this strong foundation by possibly exploring the field of ethnomusicology in the future.
Binita Pandya is a sophomore at Scripps College. She's studying human biology on the pre-med track and has danced for many years. In the future, she hopes to take knowledge from her interdisciplinary major and liberal arts education and apply it to how she treats people. On campus, she serves as mentor for Asian American freshman and is involved with various South Asian cultural clubs. She was drawn to Movement as Culture by the prospect of being able to study more powerful female dancers aside from the ones she had researched on previously, the Devadasis. Taking her knowledge about the Devadasis and the researching about the Ouled Nail led to her topic about examining the colonial response to powerful female dancers.
Katalina Peterson is a student at Scripps College, and she is deeply invested in acquiring knowledge through the exploration of interdisciplinary fields of study. Through her yoga practice she has fostered an awareness of mind and body, and she has striven to apply both of these skills to her study of dance. She was drawn to the Movement as Culture course by the prospect of learning how to perform dance by way of learning about the cultures, histories, and contexts from which dance arises. Her research interest in linguistics has been continually enriched throughout this course by studying the role dance plays in proverbs, Orientalist terms for the Middle Eastern woman, and colonial notions of the MENAT regions. This field of study is necessary, as it serves to reverse eurocentric hegemony and return control over cultural dance to its rightful groups and identities. This ties in directly with her topic, which discusses Israeli appropriation of native Palestinian dance forms such as Dabke.