Constance Valis Hill

Constance Valis Hill has a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. She has taught at the Alvin Ailey School of American Dance, Conservatoire d’arts Dramatique in Paris, and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. As a choreographer, director, and mask specialist, she has worked with the French playwright Eugene Ionesco; Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda; Romanian director Liviu Ciulei; and Toni Morrison on her play Dreaming Emmett, directed by Gilbert Moses. Her writings have appeared in Dance Magazine, Village Voice, Dance Research Journal, Studies in Dance History, Discourses in Dance, and more. Her book, “Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers” received the Deems Taylor ASCAP Award. Her book, “Tap Dancing America, A Cultural History,” for which she received the Bueno de la Torre Prize for dance scholarship and the Tap Preservation Award from the American Tap Dance Foundation, was supported by grants from the John D. Rockefeller and John Simon Guggenheim foundations. She has donated a 3,500-record database, “Tap Dance in America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of Tap Performance on Stage, Film, and Media” to the Library of Congress as the first online historiography of tap dance.