James Moreno

James Moreno is a dance studies scholar, choreographer, and Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at KU. He uses performance to explore how people use their bodies to create meaning, develop communities, and respond to social systems. His book, Dances of José Limón and Erick Hawkins (Routledge, 2020) examines stagings of masculinity, whiteness, and Latinidad in mid-century US modern dance. Moreno’s current choreographic project, Traqueros, explore issues of immigration and assimilation in communities of Mexican and Mexican-American railroad workers. (Traquero is a Spanish term referring to Mexican and Mexican-American railroad workers.) Traqueros is being produced as a “screendance” or dance-video and will premiere in October, 2020. During his time as an ARI fellow, Moreno explored how stories of race and gender travel with the sampling, remixing, and embodiment of dance across the internet and social media. This research resulted in the KU Dance Company performance "The Downloading Race Challenge."