Melanie Kloetzel
Melanie Kloetzel is a settler choreographer, performer, scholar, and educator based in Moh’kinstis on the traditional Treaty 7 lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy. She is the artistic director of kloetzel&co., as well as co-artistic director of the art intervention collective TRAction, which produces the Climate Art Web (CAW-WAC). Employing practice-as-research methodologies, Kloetzel has developed events, workshops, films and encounters in theatre spaces, alternative venues, spaces of public assembly, and online environments for kloetzel&co., TRAction, and as a guest artist. Reflections/analysis of her research creation practices have enjoyed publication in edited anthologies and peer reviewed journals such as Dance Research Journal, Contemporary Theatre Review, Choreographic Practices, Performance Research and New Theatre Quarterly, among others. Her anthology with Carolyn Pavlik, Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternative Spaces is currently available in hard cover, paperback, and as an eBook from the University Press of Florida, and the recently released co-authored volumes, (Re)Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Perspectives and Covert: A Handbook, are available through Intellect and Triarchy Press, respectively. Before her current position as Professor of Dance at the University of Calgary, Kloetzel was the Director of the Dance program at Idaho State University from 2004-2007. Kloetzel has performed nationally and internationally with such artists as Ann Carlson, Kim David Arrow, and the Leah Stein Dance Company, and was a member of Race Dance under the direction of Lisa Race from 1995-2000. Kloetzel holds a PhD in Dance Studies from the University of Roehampton, an MFA in Experimental Choreography from the University of California at Riverside, an MA in History from the University of Montana, and a BA from Swarthmore College. She was also a 2003 recipient of the Chancellors Distinguished Fellowship Award from The University of California.
