Catherine Cole (she/her)

Catherine M. Cole is Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington, where she served as Divisional Dean of the Arts from 2016-2022. Her book Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice (2020), on dance and live art in contemporary South Africa and beyond, received a 2021 Special Citation for the Dance Studies Association's de la Torre Bueno Prize. Cole's previous books include Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010), the co-edited book Africa After Gender? (2007), and Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (2001), a finalist for African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize and ASTR’s Barnard Hewitt book award. Cole has published dozens of articles as well as numerous chapters in edited volumes. Her disability dance theater piece Five Foot Feat toured North America in 2002-2005. She received the UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award, fellowships from the National Humanities Center Fellowship, Harvard Theatre Collection, and AAUW, and grants from the Mellon Foundation, Freie Universität Berlin, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Fund for U.S. Artists. 

Cole is the recipient of a 2024-25 UW Royalty Research Fund Grant and Kreilsheimer and Jones Large Grant for her current project, "Difference, Differently: Tejumola Olaniyan and the Practice of Global Black Cultural Studies." 

On Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: