MJ Thompson has been watching and writing about movement and performance for over twenty years. Committed to popular culture and everyday aesthetics, she has written for a wide variety of publications, including Ballettanz, Border Crossings, The Brooklyn Rail, Canadian Art, Dance Current, Dance Ink, Dance Magazine, The Drama Review, The Globe and Mail, Women and Performance, the Village Voice, and more. Her academic work is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada; and her essays have appeared in several anthologies, including performance Studies Canada (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2017). Most recently, she received the National Park Services Arts and Sciences Residency, Cape Cod National Seashore, August 2019, where she worked on a long-form essay about the body in landscape. She was a Lillian S. Robinson Fellow at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Montreal in 2010. Her dissertation, “Impure Movement: Mundane Body Techniques in 20th Century American Choreography,” (NYU 2009) was recipient of the Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull Memorial Award for Academic Excellence.
