Michael J. Love

Assistant Professor of Dance

Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar whose embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity. Prior to joining the Dance faculty at Ursinus, Love was a 2021-23 Princeton University Arts Fellow and Lecturer in the Program in Dance at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Love’s current project, The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection, is a triptych of performance installations that sample and loop various media and sounds to “rhythm dream” sites of liberation. His other ongoing projects, such as #SampledMixedandRemixed, explore Black performance histories and theorize queer presence in unexpected locations in cultural and institutional archives. In Texas, Love’s work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival and ARCOS Dance and recognized by the Austin Critics Table. His article, “‘Mix(tap)ing:’ A method for sampling the past to envision the future,” was published in Choreographic Practices. Love was one of four dance artists featured in filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Trace Of An Implied Presence at The Shed in New York. Additionally, Love and frequent collaborator, anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson, were the recipients of the 2021 Tito’s Vodka Prize. In New York, Jackson and Love’s videos have been programmed by CUE Art Foundation and the New Museum and screened at the Museum of Modern Art. Love’s credits include the Broadway laboratory for choreographer Savion Glover and director George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along…, and roles in works by choreographer Baakari Wilder. Love is a native of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.