The de la Torre Bueno Prize is an annual award offered by the
Dance Studies Association for the best book published in English in the field of dance studies. The award honors
José Rollin de la Torre Bueno, the first university press editor to develop a dance studies titles list.[1] The award of $1000 recognizes exemplary scholarship and important contributions to the field.
From its creation in 1973 to 2001, the prize was awarded by the Dance Perspectives Foundation, an organization founded in 1966 to support dance scholarship. However, the de la Torre Bueno family severed the relationship with the Foundation in 2001, and from 2002 until 2016, the prize was awarded by the
Society of Dance History Scholars.[2] When the Society of Dance History Scholars merged with the
Congress on Research in Dance in 2017 to become the Dance Studies Association, the de la Torre Bueno Prize transferred, as well.[3]
Award winners
Awarded by SDHS
2016 - Prize to Melissa Blanco Borelli for She is Cuba. Oxford University Press, 2015.
2014 - Prize to Prarthana Purkayastha for Indian Modern Dance, Feminism and Transnationalism in New World Choreographies series, eds. Rachel Fensham & Peter M. Boenisch. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
2014 - Special citation to Rebecca Rossen for Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. Oxford University Press, 2014.
2013 - Prize to Felicia McCarren for French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop. Oxford University Press, 2012.
2013 - Special citation to Hélène Neveu Kringelbach for Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-fashioning in Urban Senegal. Berghahn Books, 2013. Special citation to Paul A. Scolieri for Dancing the New World: Aztecs, Spaniards, and the Choreography of Conquest. University of Texas Press, 2013.
2012 - Special citation to Ramón H. Rivera-Servera for Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics. University of Michigan Press, 2012. Special citation to Tilden Russell for The Compleat Dancing Master: A Translation of Gottfried Taubert’s Rechtschaffener Tantzmeister (1717). Peter Lang, 2012.
2011 - Prize to Carrie J. Preston for Modernism’s Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
2010 - Prize to Constance Valis Hill for Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
2010 - Special citation to Susan A. Reed for Dance and the Nation: Performance, Ritual, and Politics in Sri Lanka. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Special citation to Jerri Daboo forRitual, Rapture and Remorse: A Study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
2009 - Prize to Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Culture at Harvard University, for Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s. Boston: MIT Press, 2008.
2009 - Special citation to Anthea Kraut, Associate Professor of Dance at the University of California-Riverside, for Choreographing the Folk: the Dance Stagings of Zora Neale Hurston. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2008.
2008 - Prize to Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Associate Professor of Dance at University of California-Riverside, for The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
2008 - Special citation to Janice Ross, Associate Professor (Teaching) of Drama at Stanford University, for Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
2008 - Special citation to Sydney Hutchinson, research associate at the University of Arizona's Southwest Center and doctoral candidate at New York University, for From Quebradita to Duranguense: Dance in Mexican Youth Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007.
2007 - Prize to Gay Morris, independent scholar and critic in New York City, for A Game for Dancers: Performing Modernism in the Postwar Years, 1945-1960. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2006.
2007 - Special citation to Lucia Ruprecht, a University Lecturer in German and Fellow of Emmanuel College at the University of Cambridge, for Dances of the Self in Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann and Heinrich Heine. Hampshire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006.
2006 - prize to Yvonne Daniel, Professor Emerita of Dance and Afro-American Studies at Smith College and 2005-2006 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, for Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
2005 - prize to Thomas DeFrantz, Associate Professor of Music and Theatre Arts at MIT, for his book Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey's Embodiment of African American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
2005 - special citation to
David Gere, Associate Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, for How to Make Dances in an Epidemic: Tracking Choreography in the Age of AIDS. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.
2005 - special citation to
Deborah Jowitt, dance critic for the Village Voice and Adjunct Professor at NYU, for Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
2004 - prize to
Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Professor Emerita of Dance at Temple University, for The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
2004 - special citation to
Jennifer Fisher, Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of California-Irvine, for Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
2003 - prize to Susanna Sloat, critic and independent scholar in New York City, for her edited anthology Caribbean Dance from Abakuá to Zouk: How Movement Shapes Identity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
2003 - special citation to
Donald McKayle, renowned choreographer and Professor of Dance at University of California-Irvine, for his memoir Transcending Boundaries: My Dancing Life. London and New York: Routledge Harwood, 2002.
2002 - No prize awarded by SDHS.
Awarded by Dance Perspectives Foundation
2001 prize to Marian Smith, Ballet and Opera in the Age of Giselle
2001 special citation to Stephanie Jordan, Moving Music: Dialogues with Music in Twentieth-Century Ballet
2000 prize to Suki Schorer, Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique
2000 special citation to John Forrest, The History of Morris Dancing 1438-1750
1999 prize to
Debra H. Sowell, The Christensen Brothers: An American Dance Epic
^Dance Perspectives Foundation records 1966-2003 held in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library.
http://archives.nypl.org/dan/18490