About Barbie & Meredith

Originally from the midwestern USA (Kiikaapoi land), Barbie Diewald is a dancer, choreographer and Assistant Professor of Dance at Mount Holyoke College. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow in Choreography and New England Foundation for the Arts New Work New England Grant Recipient. Her dances have been presented in New York at BAM, the 92nd Street Y, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, University Settlement, The Center for Performance Research, The Chocolate Factory, and The Kitchen, and regionally at the Academy of Music Theatre, A.P.E Gallery, The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, High Street Studios, and MAGMA (Movement Arts Gloucester). Diewald has developed her work through residencies at Jacob’s Pillow, Bates Dance Festival, the Bogliasco Foundation, The Iron Factory, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Cleveland School for the Arts, Ponderosa, Subcircle and SILO at Kirkland Farm. She is a recent Jacob’s Pillow faculty research fellow, and has presented her research at conferences held by the Dance Studies Association, National Dance Education Organization, and International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. Diewald holds a BFA in Theatre from Millikin University and MFA in Dance from Smith College.

Meredith Bove is a dancer and dramaturg based in western Massachusetts. Her practices move between and across performance, writing, dance, and audio. Through each of these mediums, she is devoted to engaging the tensions between language and embodied experience. Meredith has taught dance and performance studies at Hollins University (2011–2012 & 2016), Montgomery College (2014–2016), Springfield College (2016), Keene State College (2017–2020), Smith College (2021–2022), and most recently as Visiting Artist in Dance at Mount Holyoke College (2022–2025) where she led seminars on dance writing and dramaturgy, and queer and feminist performance. She has collaborated as a dramaturg with choreographers Barbie Diewald, Rebecca Pappas, and Lailye Weidman, and has performed in the work of Jérôme Bel, Luis Lara Malvacías, Sharon Mansur, Stephanie Miracle, Jillian Peña, Sara Smith, and Karinne Keithley Syers. Her writing on performance has been published in ThINKingDANCE, Culturebot, and Contact Quarterly; for The Making Room (2018), a collaboration between choreographers Bebe Miller and Susan Rethorst; and by Keene State College’s Redfern Arts Center for Reggie Wilson’s POWER (2021). She was Associate Editor for Contact Quarterly between 2018–2020, and continues to be influenced by the publication’s legacy and commitment to articulating the unfolding experience of embodiment.

barbiediewald.com

photo: Peter Raper