Dr. Melissa Melpignano

Melissa Melpignano is Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research broadly examines how dance and choreography inform theories of conflict and settler colonialism in contested and militarized regions (such as Palestine-Israel and the Mexico-U.S. border) and in public discourse (particularly around healthcare access and water distribution).

 Her current book project, Unsettling Choreographies: Dancing Livability in Palestine-Israel, examines how, since the 2014 war on Gaza, choreographic practices have challenged, questioned, disturbed, denormalized, and invalidated settler-colonial ideas and mechanisms, thereby generating new trajectories and models of livability. Her next book project studies the use of concert dance as a bureaucratic tool in the context of Israel. As a ballet historian, she has a forthcoming monograph on how presence of dancing and choreographic bodies in 18th and 19th-century Italian dance librettos comments upon the contested territorial, political, and cultural dynamics of the Italian territories before national unification.

 She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts research grant for the project “Somatics and Movement for Healthcare” (2024-2026) and of the 2024 UTEP Rising Researcher Award in Social Science, Arts, Culture & Society. Her article “A Necropower Carnival: Israeli Soldiers Dancing in the Palestinian Occupied Territories” (TDR: The Drama Review, 67, 1, 2023), received the 2024 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics from the American Society for Aesthetics. Her scholarship also appears in The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, 50 Contemporary Choreographers (3rd edition), Contemporary Choreography (3rd edition), Dance Research Journal, Journal of Dance Education, among others.

 Melpignano maintains an intense choreographic practice. She has recently collaborated as a dramaturg with Hadar Ahuvia (nefesh, 2023) and Alexx Shilling (Absence: A History, 2025 version) and has co-choreographed with Allison Orr/Forklift Danceworks (Water Moves, 2025). In February 2026, she will premiere Carrying Change, a performance featuring six healthcare providers and six professional dancers that honors healthcare workers and explores the conflicts that make the healthcare system unsustainable.

 She earned a PhD in Culture & Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MA in Literary Studies with an emphasis on dance literature from the University of Lugano (CH), a BA (Summa cum Laude) from the University of Venice (Italy), and a BA(Hons) in Contemporary Dance from the London Contemporary Dance School/University of Kent (UK).