Catherine Marie Davalos

Catherine Marie Davalos serves as Professor of Dance and Director of the Dance Program at Saint Mary's College of California within the School of Liberal Arts. Since developing the program from inception in 1997, she has established comprehensive offerings including traditional undergraduate dance training, the LEAP professional dancer program, and MFA degrees in Dance: Creative Practice and Design and Production. Her nationally recognized leadership culminated in the Saint Mary's College Dance Company's 2010 Kennedy Center performance at the National College Dance Festival.

Her academic credentials feature foundational training at California State University, Long Beach:

• B.A. in Philosophy and Dance (1985)
• M.F.A. in Dance (1995), honored as "Most Outstanding Graduate for the College of the Arts"

Davalos's research manifests through choreographic practice interrogating Chicana identity, heteronormativity, and feminist perspectives. Her work explores the tensions of being a "Mexican American Princess"—navigating invisibility and visibility as a brown-skinned Californian—while celebrating nonconforming bodies, races, and sexual identities. This scholarship bridges dance history, criticism, and community activism, centering Latina voices through embodied research that challenges dominant cultural narratives.

Analysis of her 2017-2018 scholarly outputs reveals a cohesive trajectory in Chicana feminist dance praxis. These works demonstrate sophisticated integration of site-specific performance, cross-cultural collaboration, and social justice frameworks. Key patterns include transnational partnerships (notably with Italy's City of Panicale), community-engaged curation (Radical Acts of Love festival), and theoretical exploration of dance companies as laboratories for intersectional identity work. Her methodology consistently merges artistic creation with critical analysis of gender, race, and immigration.

Her distinguished recognition includes:

• Artist OF NOTE: The Immigrant Issue international selection (2014)
• Most Outstanding Graduate for the College of the Arts (CSU Long Beach, 1995)

Davalos mentors dancers across Saint Mary's undergraduate and graduate programs while securing substantial research funding through competitive grants. Her artistic projects have received significant support including:

• National Endowment for the Arts grant (2011) for full-evening work "Volver"
• Zellerbach Family Fund Community Arts Grant (2006)
• Ongoing sponsorship from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Saint Mary's Faculty Development Office

As founder of the Davalos Dance Company (1994), she cultivates an artistic ecosystem spanning the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers (where she serves as founding member), international collaborations with Italian cultural institutions, and Bay Area performance networks including CounterPulse and ODC. This infrastructure actively produces community-focused work praised by The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times while advancing her vision of dance as radical social practice.