Barbie Diewald directs Barbie Diewald Choreography, a research and performance ensemble based in Western Massachusetts and New York. Diewald has been a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Choreography, Bogliasco Foundation Fellow, and a Bessie Schonberg Choreographer at New York Live Arts. Her choreographic work has been presented extensively in New York City (BAM, Movement Research at Judson Church, The 92nd Street Y), Western Massachusetts (Jacob’s Pillow, A.P.E. Gallery, The Academy of Music Theatre), and internationally at pOnderosa (Germany), the Bogliasco Foundation Center (Italy), and Banff Centre for the Arts (Canada). She has collaborated with a broad range of artists including Bronwen MacArthur, Katie Martin, and Kate Seethaler, and is currently in process with Sara Smith. Diewald's current work, Pare, challenges the scale, utility and memory of formal performance spaces, and moves toward intimacy as an ethos of resisting hierarchy and reshaping trauma. She is also developing a feminist pedagogy that draws from intertextuality, and considers Creative Bibliography as a mobilizing force for embodied knowledge. Diewald holds a BFA in Theatre from Millikin University and MFA in Dance from Smith College. She was a Visiting Lecturer in dance at Keene State College in 2017, and a Visiting Artist at Mount Holyoke College from 2017-2019.
Barbie Diewald
Recent Campus News
Major grant for dance research
Barbie Diewald, assistant professor of dance at Mount Holyoke College, is on a team of researchers looking to quantify dance with computer-based tools.
All the angles
Dance instructor Barbie Diewald used an iPad, laptops, a ladder and many props to bring the dance studio to her Mount Holyoke students — remotely.
From practice to performance in 23 hours
When Mount Holyoke announced the move to distance learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic, senior class dancers decided the show must go on.
Meet Mount Holyoke’s newest faculty 2019
Mount Holyoke’s newest faculty bring innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship to the College’s thriving intellectual community.
Recent Grants
Fellowship from the New England Foundation for the Arts for their New Work New England project: Concourse. The fellowship is for one year.
Recent Honors
Was named a Faculty Research Fellow by the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival Archives for her project "Consoling Clarity: Queer and Lesbian Aesthetics in Twenty-First Century Dance."
Were artists-in-residence at the renowned Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival. At the culmination of their residency, they shared an excerpt of their shared research, "Concourse" at the annual Jacob's Pillow College Partners Convening. Their next choreographic residency will be at High Street Studios in Ipswich, MA in December 2021.
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