Joselli Audain Deans, Associate Professor in the School of Dance, originally from Brooklyn, NY, is a first generation Haitian American. She joined the Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH) after receiving most of her training at the company’s school, and danced with the company for eleven years. During her career with DTH she danced numerous roles, including “the accused as a child” in Agnes de Mille’s Fall River Legend, the Bride in Geoffrey Holder’s Dougla, and demi-soloist roles in Swan Lake and George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments. A scholar and an artist, she holds a Doctorate in Dance Education from Temple University. Her research primarily focuses on Black ballet dancers in the American Dance World. She is also interested in the intersection of worship and dance.

She has taught dance technique at Philadanco and several academic institutions including Bryn Mawr College, Eastern University, and Temple University; presented her work at scholarly conferences and institutions, including the International Association of Blacks in Dance, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Corps de Ballet International, University of Georgia, Temple University, and Collegium for African Diaspora Dance (CADD). Her research is published on Arthur Mitchell’s archival collection on Columbia University’s library website and in (Re:) Claiming Ballet edited by Adesola Akinleye. She has served as a consultant for several institutions and projects including for DTH, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, School of American Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Charlotte Ballet, the Dance Oral History Project for NYPL, the documentary Black Ballerina, and was a design and facilitation team member for the Equity Project: Increasing the Presence of Blacks in Ballet, that concluded in 2020. Along with Dr.  P. Kimberley Jordan, she is the co-founder of the Black Ballet Research Collaborative. She is a Mellon-funded Transformative Intersectional Collective (TRIC) grant member housed in the School for Cultural & Social Transformation at the University of Utah and received financial support provided by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts for events surrounding the work for this publication.