Jill Nunes Jensen

Biography

Dr. Jill Nunes Jensen is a member of the Dance faculty at Loyola Marymount University. She is also faculty at the Trudl Zipper Dance Institute of the Colburn School where she teaches courses in artistic inquiry and leads conversations with invited guest artists. Dr. Nunes Jensen has a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside and a masters in Dance from UCLA. She has instructed courses in dance history, ballet technique, dance as social action, choreography, and serves as a senior thesis mentor. For years, her research has been the primary scholarship on Alonzo King LINES Ballet and she has presented on the company internationally. Her work has been published in the journals Dance Chronicle and Theatre Survey, in addition to the books When Men Dance, Perspectives on American Dance: The Twentieth Century, and Re-thinking Dance History (2nd ed.). Dr. Nunes Jensen has organized conferences in Los Angeles and New York City, and has served on the executive board of what is now the Dance Studies Association. In 2016, she co-curated the first conference dedicated to contemporary ballet at the Center for Ballet and the Arts (NYU) and Barnard College (Columbia). She has been an invited speaker at the San Francisco Ballet’s Boundless Symposium (2018), Duke University (2019), and the University of Maryland (2021). As co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (2021), the first treatment of contemporary ballet as a discipline, Dr. Nunes Jensen’s work and pedagogical approach to dance history seeks to shift the discourse of ballet studies by centering the work of artists of color. At present, she is working on a monograph about Alonzo King LINES Ballet, a San Francisco-based company founded by King in 1982.

Education (4)

University of California, Riverside: Dance History & Theory, Ph.D.

University of California, Los Angeles: M.A., Dance

University of California, Irvine: B.A., Dance

Cum Laude

University of California, Irvine: B.A., Political Science

Cum Laude