Claudia Brazzale

Lecturer in Dance in the Lewis Center for the Arts

Claudia Brazzale is an artist and scholar from Italy. She received a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Master in Performance Studies from New York University.

As a dancer, Brazzale initially trained at the London Contemporary Dance School and the Merce Cunningham Studio. Her interest in movement has taken her to South East Asia and Africa as well as throughout Europe and North America to explore diverse forms of dance and performance genres—from postmodern dance and Butoh to South Indian and West African dance, from Strassberg Method Acting to experimental theatre—and to study dance and the body through different approaches and media. Besides dancing with several independent performance groups in Italy and the USA, Brazzale created and performed her own choreographies and dance-videos. In collaboration with filmmaker Peter Goodman she created Looping Corridors (selected and presented at the 8th Raindance Film Festival, London; Il Coreografo Elettronico, Napoli; Dance Screen 2000, Münich; VI Festival Internacional de Videodanza, Buenos Aires, 2000). She also collaborated with Italian filmmaker Giancarlo Torri in the production of the video support for the performance The Aging Daughter (produced by Fabbrica Europa, Firenze 2001, and selected for the Italian platform of the "VIII Rencontres Choreographiques Internationales de Bagnolet, Seine-St. Denis"). At present, she is working on two different dance documentaries: Performing Afropean Bodies and Retracing Steps, a collaboration with film producer Tanja Meding.

Dr. Brazzale is currently an AAUW International Postdoctoral Fellow and a Global Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, where she is engaged in the preparation of a book manuscript based on her dissertation. Titled Producing Cosmopolitanism: Gender and Modernity in the Family-Firms of the Italian Nordest, the manuscript explores the ways that globalization and its promise of modernity seduced the entrepreneurial culture of northeastern Italy and discusses the impact of this seduction on gendered subjectivities. More specifically, it examines the role of women in the recent economic development of northeastern Italy and exposes the ways in which paternalistic authority is inscribed in new postmodern ways. The uniqueness of this project is that it borrows from Dance and Performance Studies and extends their discourses to intervene in a subject traditionally studied by the social sciences.