Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist, scholar, and educator. His embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity.

 

Michael is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College. Prior to joining the Dance faculty at Ursinus, he was a 2021-23 Princeton University Arts Fellow and Lecturer in the Program in Dance at Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Michael holds an M.F.A. in Performance as Public Practice from the Department of Theatre and Dance at The University of Texas at Austin and is an alumnus of Emerson College. 

 

Michael’s current project, The AURALVISUAL MIXTAPE Collection (Part I, Part II, and Part III), is a triptych of performance installations that sample and loop various media and sounds to “rhythm dream” sites of liberation. His other ongoing projects, such as #SampledMixedandRemixed, explore Black performance histories and theorize queer presence in unexpected locations in cultural and institutional archives. In Texas, Michael’s work has been supported and presented by Fusebox Festival and ARCOS Dance and recognized by the Austin Critics' Table. His article, “‘Mix(tap)ing:’ A method for sampling the past to envision the future,” was published in Choreographic Practices. Michael was one of four dance artists featured in filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden’s The Trace Of An Implied Presence at The Shed in New York (2022). Additionally, Michael and frequent collaborator, anti-disciplinary artist Aryel René Jackson, were the recipients of the 2021 Tito’s Vodka Prize. In New York, Aryel and Michael’s videos have been programmed by CUE Art Foundation and the New Museum and screened at the Museum of Modern Art. Love’s credits include the Broadway laboratory for choreographer Savion Glover and director George C. Wolfe’s Shuffle Along…, and roles in works by choreographer Baakari Wilder. Love is a native of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

​