Dance performance: Michael J. Love

Michael J. Love (b. 1987) is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist, scholar, and educator. He is a 2021 – 23 Princeton University Arts Fellow and lecturer at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program at Goddard College. His embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theory and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity. In Austin, Texas, his work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival, ARCOS Dance, Ground Floor Theatre, and The Cohen New Works Festival. Love’s performance credits include the Broadway laboratory for Savion Glover and George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along as well as roles in works by Baakari Wilder.

Love collaborates frequently with film-based artist Ariel René Jackson. The two were the recipients of the 2021 Tito’s Vodka Prize and their works have been featured and programmed nationally and internationally. These presentations include the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and CUE Art Foundation in New York; T: The New York Times Style Magazine’s #TBlackArtBlackLife Instagram series; DARC’s Project Space in Ottawa; and the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington.

Love holds an MFA in performance as public practice from The University of Texas at Austin and is an alumnus of Emerson College. He is originally from the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Learn more at DancerMLove.com.