Lester Tomé Conference

Biography

Lester Tomé is an associate professor in the dance department and affiliated with the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Smith. She is also a faculty member in the Cinco Colegios Dance Department. He is a professor of dance history and ethnography, cultural studies and research methods. Her recent courses include European and American Concert Dance since 1900, Dance and Culture, Critical Studies in Latin American Dance, Salsa in Theory and Practice, and, at the graduate level, Contemporary Dance Philosophy and Dance Literature: Theory and Cultural Studies.

In 2013-2014, he was the Peggy Rockefeller Visiting Professor at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. During the period 2014-2015, he was a fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities and an affiliated researcher at the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard. These awards supported her research for The Body Politic: Ballet and Revolution in Cuba (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). The book illuminates developments in Cuban ballet as a result of the ideology and cultural politics of the Cuban Revolution. Examines issues of political agency, class, labor, nationalism, race, gender, and sexuality. It also clarifies the links between ballet performance and other performances of the ideology of the Revolution, for example, the performance of militarism in parades, work in the sugar cane fields, machismo in everyday life, interracial romance in the public sphere.

Tomé has been invited to lecture at Columbia, Harvard, Marquette, Tufts, Haverford, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Akron, the Korean Dance Society, and other institutions. He is a member of the editorial board of Dance Research Journal. Since 2012, she has chaired the Dance History Studies Society's Working Group for Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Dance Studies.

He was interviewed for NPR's Weekend Edition and Smith's Insight, and consulted for stories in Pointe Magazine, CNN and Yahoo News.

As a dance critic, he worked for CMBF-Radio Musical Nacional (Cuba) and El Mercurio (Chile), and was a contributor to Dance Magazine and other publications. In 2004, he participated in the Institute for Dance Criticism of the American Dance Festival as a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Times Foundation.