School of the Arts and Architecture
150 Kaufman Hall
Box 951608
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1608
World Arts and Cultures/Dance
310-825-3951
Department e-mail
Defined by a dynamic blend of theory and practice, the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance (WACD) is led by a renowned faculty of scholars, activists, curators, filmmakers, and choreographers dedicated to critical cross-cultural analysis and art-making. The department supports development of choreographic practice, exploration of digital media, curation of exhibitions, arts activistism, and development of scholarly expertise in culture and the arts. Multiple disciplines and artistic approaches encourage students to position their work within broad social contexts.
The World Arts and Cultures BA focuses on the study of societal change through a critical examination of art making across cultures, creativity across formats and genres, and social movements both historical and contemporary. The Dance BA integrates composition, training, and improvisation, while challenging students to locate dance politically, culturally, and historically. The MFA in Choreographic Inquiry promotes expansive choreographic experimentation and engages with global discourses around the body and performance. The PhD program in Culture and Performance addresses areas of experimental ethnography, performance studies, dance studies, environmental humanities, and visual culture studies offering a unique interdisciplinary training that fosters groundbreaking independent research.
Department faculty direct various centers and initiatives, providing opportunities for students to learn in and from alternative spaces. Since 2015, the Prison Education Program has provided courses in seven carceral facilities in Southern California. The courses bring UCLA professors and students into prisons for classes and workshops with incarcerated students.
The Art and Global Health Center enables undergraduate and graduate students to explore art as a life-saving activity. The center’s work addresses comprehensive sexual health education, women’s empowerment, gender equality, LGBTQ identity and inclusion, anti-racism, and mental health.
The programs of the department are committed to academic excellence, diversity, freedom of expression, activism, and social transformation through the arts.
The undergraduate program offers majors in Dance and in World Arts and Cultures.
The BA in Dance thoroughly integrates learning to dance, learning to make dances, and critical interrogation of dance as a cultural practice. Students study a variety of dance forms throughout their career. They enroll in a four-term sequence in dance composition, with additional opportunities to participate in the creation of their own dances, as well as work as dancers in the creation of new works by faculty members, visiting artists, and MFA students. Further, they engage in a core of four courses in the study of scholarly discourse around the body and dance, emphasizing critical inquiry of dance practice and embodiment, and what dance can do at a personal, political, social, and cultural level.
The BA in World Arts and Cultures highlights art making, activism, and community collaboration as key perspectives for understanding culture and society. Through coursework, which includes both the study and practice of creativity along with research, the department is committed to an education that challenges a solely textbook approach to learning. Responding to contemporary culture and politics, the critical analysis of information across a range of modalities is accentuated including social media, politics, ethnography, filmic representations, particularly documentaries, and the performative arts. Study often moves beyond a textbook method of learning, working regularly with community organizations, prisons, and Indigenous collectives.
All students are encouraged to complement the required set of core and elective departmental courses with others offered across campus, such as courses from ethnic and area studies programs. Students may organize their course of study in relation to particular interests or professional goals (e.g., international comparative studies; intercultural studies; education; area specializations such as Africa, Asia, or Latin America; minority discourse; gender studies). A key aspect of the required coursework emerges in both lower-division and upper-division courses, where students learn from art practitioners working in diverse fields. While the mediums vary from year to year, they all provide hands on training in a workbench approach to studying art making across, and with, various communities. The coursework enables a student to decide in their junior year whether to pursue working on a specific praxis project, culminating with a senior showcase in their final year, or to develop a study sequence in preparation for life beyond the World Arts and Cultures program.
The graduate program offers a PhD degree in Culture and Performance and a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Choreographic Inquiry.
Culture and Performance (CAP) students seek to generate knowledge from within a community-engaged framework through diverse theoretical lenses including experimental ethnography, corporeality and embodiment, visual and material culture, and critical curatorial studies. Through an emphasis on movement practice and artistic intervention, the program encourages research that critiques but also contributes to the visual and performing arts. A key premise of the program is an emphasis on interdisciplinary methodological training. While individual students’ projects address diverse themes that require different approaches to operationalize, the CAP program’s curriculum regarding research methodology grounds all endeavors in a rigorous, ethical methodological framework. Doctoral students are given the opportunity to engage with a broad survey of strategies for implementing a research design—depending on their project, they move between methodologies within the arts, ethnographic inquiry, activist strategies, and the core premises of the decolonial turn.
The MFA in Choreographic Inquiry is a two-year program designed to support and focus the research interests of choreographic artists and to prepare them for teaching at the university level. The program focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of art-making, exploring cultural and political issues that arise for contemporary artists, with an attention to dance-making in a global and interdisciplinary context.
While operating with considerable independence, the two graduate degree areas are unified by the department’s common concern for aesthetic production, corporeality and performance, the dynamics of tradition, and community-embedded research practice. Connections are forged between critical theory and artistic practices, and attention is given to the changing social roles and responsibilities of artists, practitioners, and scholars of the arts in the U.S. and worldwide.
Undergraduates and graduates have excelled in fields including technology and the arts, videography, curatorial practice, documentary work, public service, education, theatrical/events production, choreography and performing arts, urban planning, law, environmental activism, public health, and medicine. They have made careers in community nonprofits and activist groups, government arts agencies, museums, arts foundations, and academia.
World Arts and Cultures/Dance courses are in the following subject areas:
