imprint

program logistics:

• program year: September 1, 2025 - September 1, 2026

• application opens Fri May 16th, 2025 and is due Mon June 16th, 2025 by 11:59pm PST

• 3 emerging dance writers will be selected

  • note: this fellowship program is not intended for full-time students given the time requirements

• $500 stipend for each fellow to be received at end of program

• time commitment:

  • 30 hours of work/study a year, which includes 6 x 1.5hr cohort meetings over the course of the year

  • seeing 5 performances over the year

  • producing at least 2-3 writing pieces for publication on the PDW blog

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how it works:

imprint is an annual dance writing fellowship program designed for QTBIPOC dance writers. Artistic Director Bhumi B Patel will support three emerging dance writers through writing and publishing mentorship and professional development as a dance writer. Through this program, participating writers will be compensated $500 for 30 hours of work/study over the course of a year. During their fellowship with pateldanceworks, participating writers will attend six cohort meetings, which will include readings, discussions, writing feedback sessions, and guest speakers. Fellows will also attend at least five performances in the Bay Area and receive mentorship to write reflections on each performance attended. Over the course of the program year, fellows will have 2-3 of their completed writings published on the PDW blog. The program year will run Sep 1, 2025 - Sep 1, 2026.

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why we’re launching this program:

PDW is launching imprint at an important moment for dance writing and criticism. There has been a long history of exclusion of BIPOC and queer voices in dance writing, and artists of color and queer artists have often been written about through racially homogenous, heteronormative standards. With imprint, we hope to do something different. This program is by and for QTBIPOC, with the program being led by Artistic Director Bhumi B Patel, who has been published in Performance Research Journal, Refractions Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance. Her co-authored essay, “Locating Popular Dance and Dance in Popular Culture” and case study essays “Gender Is a Drag: Performing Hybridity on RuPaul’s Drag Race’s Maxi Challenge ‘Prancing with the Queens’” and “‘To Exist is to Survive Unfair Choices’: The OA and Queer Acts of Protest” appear in Dance in US Popular Culture edited By Jennifer Atkins. Patel has a forthcoming essay

on performing futurisms in The Routledge Companion to Performance and Technologies edited by Norah Zuniga Shaw and Maaike Bleeker. It is necessary to include voices of queer and BIPOC in dance writing to diversify how dance performance is written about and remembered. We look forward to growing and futuring dance writing, starting in the Bay Area!