Dancing Hip Hop Symposium 2015
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Racialized Body Cluster
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Hip Hop Dance Convention 2016
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Ford Foundation
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Dance Studies Association 2019
Asian American Studies Association 2019
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Storm: A Typhoon Haiyan Project
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The ʻAhahui Noiʻi Noʻeau ʻŌiwi – Research Institute of Indigenous Performance (ANNO)
Opening Plenary Panel of the Inaugural ANNO Conference, March 14-15, 2024
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The SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies Book Launch 2023
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Inspiring Excellence Through Research

Dr. Perillo's research analyzes the role of performance practices in resisting racism, sexism, and colonialism in order to build a more inclusive and equitable world.

BOOK

Choreographing in Color: Filipinos, Hip-Hop, and the Cultural Politics of Euphemism (Oxford University Press, 2020)

In Choreographing in Color, Dr. J. Lorenzo Perillo investigates the development of Filipino popular dance and performance since the late 20th century…

Articles and Chapters

“‘This is the Filipino scene for me’: Ethnicity, Gender, and Hip-hop Dance in Hawai‘i.”

Adding to fields of popular dance and gender studies, this article documents the complicated cultural formations that emerge from and counter the historical and continued marginalization of Filipinos in Hawai‘i…

“Embodying Modernism: A Postcolonial Intervention across Filipino Dance.”

This article traces a prelude to Filipino dance nationalism and uncovers colonial ideas about dance and the racialized body in the early 1900s, and the surprising choreographic genealogies that constituted the preservation process in the 1930s…

“Theorising Hip-hop Dance in the Philippines: Blurring the Lines of Genre, Mode, and Dimension.”

This article privileges the ways Hiphop dancers in Manila theorise their practices through four main aspects— genre, mode, dimension and conflict—in order to draw attention to the principles of meaning-making in contemporary Hip-hop performance…

“‘If I was not in prison, I would not be famous’: Discipline, Choreography, and Mimicry in the Philippines”

This award-winning Theatre Journal article looks at how, in 2007, 1,500 inmates in the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center (CPDRC) went “viral” with their online rendition of Michael Jackson’s music video “Thriller”…

“‘Empire State of Mind’: Hip-hop Dance in the Philippines”

This chapter appears in Hip-Hop(e): The Cultural Practice and Critical Pedagogy of International Hip-Hop, edited by Brad J. Portfilio and Michael J. Viola. This anthology that received the Critics’ Choice Award from the American Educational Studies Association. The chapter demonstrates that without a conversation with the American colonial past and neocolonial present, dance will fall short of hip-hop’s deeper emancipatory potentials…

“Filipina/o/x Americans in Dance”

This invited chapter appears in the groundbreaking SAGE Encyclopedia of Filipina/x/o American Studies, edited by Kevin Leo Yabut Nadal, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales & E. J. R. David. It provides a concise and focused overview of Filipina/o/x Americans in Dance. 

“Choreographic Analysis as Dance Studies Methodology: Cases, Expansions, and Critiques”

This solicited article is co-authored with Harmony Bench (Ohio State University, US), Rosemary Candelario (Texas Women’s University, US), and Cristina Fernandes Rosa (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil), in Dance Research Methodologies: Ethics, Orientations, and Practices, edited by Rosemary Candelario and Matthew Henley. This chapter stages a conversation about the development of choreographic analysis as a methodology, since Susan Leigh Foster’s 1986 book, Reading Dancing. Through her analyses, Foster offers a way of examining not only how dances are made and what they mean, but also how dances make meaning. The four authors included in this conversation discuss their distinct uses of choreographic analysis, outline its affordances and limitations, and ponder the ways that decolonial approaches have pushed their teaching and application
of the method.

Flyer for the Global Asian Performance Archive

“Toward an Afro-Asian Hip-Hop Dance Pedagogy”

Co-authored with Kellee E. Warren (University of Illinois at Chicago, US), this invited article appears in a special issue journal entitled Dancing in the Aftermath of Anti-Asian Violence in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, edited by SanSan Kwan and Yutian Wong. The journal issue responds to the increasing anti-Asian violence in 2021. Drawing from auto-ethnography of an Asian American Hip-Hop dance course, we critically reflect on how women students remake male-dominated dance into transformative spaces in which to express alternatives to colonialism, patriarchy, and anti-blackness.

Exhibit

“Storm: A Typhoon Haiyan Recovery Project” Center for Art + Thought

In 2014, Dr. Perillo curated a virtual exhibit with co-curator Dr. Johanna F. Almiron for the Center for Art + Thought, a web-based arts and education nonprofit organization that “harnesses the potential of digital and new media technologies in order to foster dialogues between artists, scholars, and the broader public.”

Book Review