Lloyd International Honors College

Dr. Ana Paula Höfling

Dance

Ana Paula Höfling holds a Ph.D. in Culture and Performance Studies and an MA in Dance from the University of California, Los Angeles, an MFA in Dance from the University of Hawai`i at Manoa and a BA in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to UNCG, she taught at Wesleyan University, where she was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, at the University of Wyoming, and at the Academia Superior de Artes de Bogotá in Colombia, where she was an IIE Fulbright scholar. She is a Royal Academy of Dance-trained ballet dancer and a capoeirista, having studied with Mestre Acordeon, Mestre João Grande, and since 2005, with Mestre Jogo de Dentro and the Grupo Semente do Jogo de Angola. She has published numerous articles on Afro-Brazilian embodied practices: her essay “Capoeiras of Bahia” appears in the catalogue for the exhibit “Axé Bahia: the power of art in an Afro-Brazilian metropolis” at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles. She is one of the contributing authors in the volume Performing Brazil: essays on culture, identity and the performing arts (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), and she has also published in the Brazilian Journal on Presence Studies and in the Journal for the Anthropological Study of Human Movement. Her forthcoming book, Staging Brazil: Choreographies of Capoeira (Wesleyan University Press), analyzes the role of capoeira and capoeiristas in the process of staging Brazilian “national culture” between the 1920s and the 1970s, focusing on issues of race, class, and authorship. Her new research interests include representations of mestiçagem in early twentieth-century ballet in Rio de Janeiro, and the choreographic production of Eros Volúsia, Mercedes Baptista, and Felicitas Barreto. She is a member of the Society of Dance History Scholars, the Congress on Research in Dance, the Brazilian Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association. Photo by Paula Damasceno de Oliveira.