Mellon Foundation Awards SLIPPAGE Multi-year Funding

SLIPPAGE is honored to have received a multi-year grant to fund its project “Race, Black Dance, and the Embodied Geographies of Freedom” from 2023-2025. SLIPPAGE Director Thomas F. DeFrantz, a professor in the Northwestern University School of Communication and a fellow in the Segal Design Institute at the McCormick School of Engineering, is overseeing one of 26 projects sharing more than $12 million in new grant funding from the Mellon Foundation through its inaugural Higher Learning Open Call for civic engagement and social justice-related research.

As principal investigator on the grant awarded to Northwestern, the University’s share of the funding — $500,000 — was used to expand a research project examining Black dance practices across the U.S. and how those practices help represent African American identity and Black freedom.

“We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting this project, which represents the intellectual labor of some 325 researchers affiliated with the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance, a SLIPPAGE project,” DeFrantz said. “We will continue to explore how Black dance matters and how its variegations of place predict an abundance of performance method and dance styles.”

Learn more about this award in this 2023 Northwestern Now article.

We gather together to wonder and write and hear the stories of the dance.

That’s our task here.

Many urgent ideas have come forward across the
convenings of this project, keeping us busy with
questions about an orientation towards Black being-intime. Why do some social dance formations fade in one
Black place, only to emerge as if brand-new somewhere
else? Why does it seem as though the dances actually
never “go away,” even though they could?

Black Social Dance tells us something about universal structures of practice that remain across time, and this project captures the various technologies being used to investigate challenges and transformations the Black body.

In spring 2026, the thought accumulated over the five-year span was collated into an expansive volume of essays from 28 of the project’s participating researchers. Black Social Dance: Embodied Geographies of Freedom, edited by Mellon post-doctoral associate Webster B. McDonald and Thomas F. DeFrantz, is available to download/read online. Below, learn more about each of the five symposia and the researchers involved.

We are grateful to all of the researchers, designers, printers and advisors who allowed this project to come to fruition!

Social justice + civic engagement

Mellon Foundation + SLIPPAGE + Higher Learning

SLIPPAGE is thrilled to announce funding support from the Mellon Foundation to support our work in Black Dance Studies.

Learn how Thomas F. DeFrantz plans to use the grant to expand a research project focused on local Black dance practices, national African American identity, and global Black freedom.

Read the announcement

Mellon Foundation Awards SLIPPAGE Multi-year Funding

We gather together to wonder and write and hear the stories of the dance.

That’s our task here.

Mellon Foundation + SLIPPAGE + Higher Learning

FALL 2025 Symposium

WINTER 2025 Symposium

FALL 2024 Symposium

WINTER 2024 CADD Conference

FALL 2023 Symposium

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