Ballerina Symposium Speakers

Lynn Garafola is professor emerita of dance at Barnard College, Columbia University. A dance historian who has written extensively on twentiethcentury dance, especially ballet, she is completing a biography of the choreographer Bronislava Nijinska.

Marc Happel is director of costumes at the New York City Ballet. He has collaborated with more than two dozen leading designers for NYCB’s annual fall fashion gala. He also a costume designer who lectures and curates projects on ballet and fashion.

Rosemary Harden is manager of the Fashion Museum, Bath, England, and is the author of Fashion Museum: Treasures.

Theresa Ruth Howard danced with Dance Theatre of Harlem and was a founding member of Armitage Gone! Dance. Founder and curator of Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet, a website documenting nearly 500 dancers of color, Howard has become an internationally recognized teacher, lecturer, and consultant.

Laura Jacobs is editor of the Arts Intel Report for the online weekly newsletter Air Mail. A fashion critic for The Wall Street Journal and the dance critic for The New Criterion, Jacobs’s most recent book is Celestial Bodies: How to Look at the Ballet.

Caitlyn Lehmann is a cultural historian specializing in ballet and eighteenth-century studies. She is affiliated with the University of Melbourne, writes regularly for The Australian Ballet, and is a dance critic for the U.K.’s Dancing Times.

Joel Lobenthal is a dance critic and historian who has also written extensively on fashion. He is the author of six books, most recently Red Star, White Nights: The Life and Death of Yuri Soloviev.

Patricia Mears is deputy director of The Museum at FIT. She has curated numerous exhibitions and written the accompanying texts, the most recent being Ballerina: Fashion’s Modern Muse.

Jane Pritchard, MBE, is the curator of dance at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She is also a dance historian, lecturer, archivist, and radio commentator who curated and edited the exhibition and book Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909–1929.

Russ Tallchief administers the Office of Student Diversity and Inclusion at Oklahoma City University. A playwright, author, dancer, and member of the Osage Nation of Oklahoma, Tallchief has taught classes on leadership, literature, writing, and public speaking at colleges and universities throughout Oklahoma.