Dahlia Li

Dahlia Li serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor and Post-Doctoral Fellow in Gender & Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College, where she bridges scholarly research with artistic practice to examine queer diasporic movements, cinematic representation, and embodied politics of race and gender.

Her educational trajectory includes:

• Summa cum laude in English from Princeton University (2014), with certificates from the Center for African American Studies and Center for American Studies
• MA in Writing in the Modern Age from Queen Mary, University of London (2016) as a Marshall Scholar
• Practice-based MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London (2016)

Li's research centers on how queer diasporic bodies across screen, stage, and poetry challenge colonial logics of space and racial representation. Her book project "Caress Without Body: Queer Diasporic Movements and Questions Concerning Technology" analyzes dancing bodies of color as mediators of aesthetic and spatial economies, while her pandemic-era work investigates dance-on-film in contexts like Be Heintzman Hope's queer workouts and Steve McQueen's "Lover's Rock" (2020).

Key artistic projects include the hybrid performance-text work "A De-gendered voluptuousness" and collaborative research on queer embodiment in global urban spaces with Emilio Martinez Poppe and Sophie Kovel.

Her recognition includes:

• Marshall Scholarship (2014-2016)
• Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellowship (2022-2023) through Whitney ISP

Li has taught at CUNY, Princeton University, and University of the Arts' Dance MFA while serving on curatorial teams for initiatives like "The School for Temporary Liveness Vol 2.0". Her fellowships have critically enabled her interdisciplinary scholarship and artistic production.

She currently directs the "Dance and Poetics" series at Kelly Writer's House and serves as artist faculty for New York's emergeNYC program, maintaining active performance engagements across venues including the Venice Biennale and 2022 TanzKongress.