Rate My Professor Jenefer Davies

Jenefer Davies is Department Head of Theater, Dance and Film Studies and Professor of Dance and Theater at Washington and Lee University, positions she has held since joining the institution in 2006. She also serves as Curricular Head of Dance and Artistic Director of the W&L Repertory Dance Company. Davies earned her B.A. in Theatre Arts/Dance from Hollins College in 1991, M.F.A. in Choreography/Dance from The George Washington University in 1996, and M.A.L.S. in Performance from Hollins University in 2004. Prior to her academic career, she founded contemporary modern dance companies Progeny Dance and Davies & Dancers, which performed at venues including Green Space, Dixon Place, Ailey Citigroup Theatre, and The Center for Performance Research in New York City. Her choreography has been commissioned by dance, opera, and theatre companies and toured throughout the United States, Spain, Greece, and Scotland.

Davies' research specializations encompass modern dance composition, including the integration of technology such as video, motion capture, and non-linear video editing to foster authentic movement; the feminine aesthetic; and aerial dance, for which she developed one of the first academic programs in the country, with student performances at the Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Southeastern Theatre Conference. Key publications include Aerial Dance: A Guide to Dance with Rope and Harness (Routledge, 2017) and The Art of Dance Composition: Writing the Body (Routledge, 2023), alongside articles such as "The Integration of Aerial Dance into an Academic Curriculum" (NDA Journal), "Democracy and the Body: Aerial Dance in the University Classroom" (ATINER, Athens, Greece), "The Feminine Aesthetic: Historical Truths and Contemporary Aspirations" (ICHPER-SD World Congress on Dance, Cairo, Egypt), and "Dark and Light Matters: Dance and the Planetarium" (International Planetarian Magazine, 2017). She has received the 2021 National Dance Education Organization Outstanding Dance Education Researcher Award, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowship, and grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Lenfest, Johnson Fund, Glenn Grants, Treakle Foundation, and Associated Colleges of the South Mellon. Davies has contributed editorially as a member of the Reviewer’s Board for the Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts and reviewed dance proposals for Oxford University Press. She teaches courses on contemporary European dance, dance composition, movement for actors, and aerial dance techniques.