The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University announces five resident fellows and five visiting scholars for the 2025-2026 academic year.

A research institute for artists and scholars focused on dance and related arts and sciences, the Center for Ballet and the Arts (CBA) serves as a hub for arts and ideas within NYU and the broader city. The new fellows and scholars include experts in the visual arts, dance, art history, cultural history, and choreography.

This year there are two new international initiatives. Ruth Childs, a performance artist and choreographer, is the recipient of the CBA-L’Alliance New York Fellowship, a joint initiative between the center and the nonprofit educational and arts institution for French language and culture. Janina Wellmann, a cultural historian of science from the Technische Universitӓt Berlin, holds the joint fellowship between the CBA and NYU’s Remarque Institute, which supports multidisciplinary and comparative study of Europe and its neighbors.

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, an associate professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, Meredith Dincolo, a dancer and instructor, and Isadora Wolfe, a Punchdrunk artistic associate, are the 2025-2026 Resident Fellows. They will work on projects that expand the definitions and connections of the history, practice, and performance of dance.

Virginia Johnson, former artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, returns as a visiting scholar. She is joined by Brandon Stirling Baker, a lighting designer, Herman Cornejo, choreographer and principal dancer of the American Ballet Theatre, Jennifer Harris, a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago, and Tara Zahra, the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of History at the University of Chicago.

“Dance and its related arts and science remain vital pillars of knowledge, guiding us forward through community, movement, and with embodied understanding,” said Jennifer Homans, CBA founder and director. “I am delighted to introduce this dynamic group of fellows. This promises to be a generative year at CBA.”

CBA exists to inspire fresh ideas and new dances to deepen the understanding of dance. Rooted in ballet yet inherently multidisciplinary, its aim is to open the worlds of academia and dance to each other by fostering collaboration. Since its founding in 2014, CBA has hosted 207 fellows from 19 countries who work in 12 disciplines. It provides time, space, and support for fellows and scholars to work on projects and a community that allows them to learn from and collaborate with each other.

Resident Fellows
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen is an associate professor of 19th Century European art at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts who is interested in the intersection of art history and the histories of biology and psychology. Her first book, Modern Art & the Remaking of Human Disposition (University of Chicago Press, 2021), explores how new concepts of thought and consciousness in Europe around 1900 were materialized in art through new approaches to body language. She currently is working on two books: one about the influence of art on the evolutionary thinking of Charles Darwin, and another on family, human fertility, and brother/sister relationships in the first-wave feminist era.

Meredith Dincolo is a dancer, teacher, and professional coach based in Chicago whose performance career included appearances with Lyon Opera Ballet, Nationaltheater Mannheim, and 14 seasons with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago. More recently, she performed with Robyn Mineko Williams and Artists in the premiere of Echo Mine, a full evening collaboration with the band Califone. Dincolo has been teaching since 2009, working with dance companies in the US and abroad, and staging the work of Alejandro Cerrudo. In 2023, she began collaborating with historian Tara Zahra through a fellowship with the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts Inquiry, exploring the intersection of dance and history. The partnership continues with her residency.

Isadora Wolfe is a dance-theater artist working in New York City and the Berkshires. She is an artistic associate of Punchdrunk, a company known for its immersive work Sleep No More. She has collaborated as a performer and movement director with Johannes Wieland, Martha Clarke, Richard Jones, David Auburn, Maxine Doyle, and Gerald Casel, and has taught for companies and institutions including Ailey II, Ballet Hispanico, Dual Rivet, Jacob’s Pillow, Marymount Manhattan, Rutgers University and Springboard Danse Festival. She is on the faculty at The Juilliard School where she continues to develop its Acting for Dancers course. In the fall, she will direct Metamorphosis at the Berkshire Theatre Group.

CBA-L’Alliance New York Fellow
British-American dancer and performer Ruth Childs studied dance and music in the United States, London and Geneva before working with internationally known choreographers such as La Ribot, Gilles Jobin, Marco Berrettini, Yasmine Hugonnet, and her aunt Lucinda Childs. In 2014 she founded her company, Scarlett’s, to develop her own work through dance, performance, and music. Her first stage piece in collaboration with Stéphane Vecchione, The Goldfish and the Inner Tube, premiered in 2018. Other works include fantasia, Blast! and Fun Times. Her work has been presented at Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, Bienal de Danza de Cali in Colombia, Impulstanz in Vienna, and Crossing the Lines at the L’Alliance New York. She is an artist-in-residence at Arsenic in Lausanne.

CBA-Remarque Institute Fellow
Janina Wellmann is a cultural historian of science whose work engages with forms of knowledge about life as entangled histories of spaces and disciplines, concepts and bodily practices, technology and aesthetics. Her book, Biological Motion: A History of Life (Zone Books 2024), explores how biological motion is key in guiding contemporary life science research into the organism’s molecular functions in the post-genomic era. Her first monograph, The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830 (Zone Books 2017), provided an innovative account of the advent of embryology in rethinking the meaning of development. She was the Harris Distinguished Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College and a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Visiting Scholars
Brandon Stirling Baker is a lighting designer who has worked with dance companies including the New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Australian Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, American Ballet Theater, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Miami City Ballet, Boston Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, Houston Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the Dutch National Ballet. He earned a Tony Award nomination for his lighting of Illinoise, and received the Knight of Illumination Award for his work in dance. Baker has designed over 30 premieres worldwide for choreographer Justin Peck, and works frequently with William Forsythe, Jamar Roberts, and Pam Tanowitz, among others. He is a lecturer in Design at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University.

Herman Cornejo is one of the most celebrated ballet dancers of his generation. At 16, he made history as the youngest Gold Medal winner at the International Moscow Competition. He joined American Ballet Theatre in 1999 and was promoted to principal dancer in 2003. Cornejo has mastered the full classical repertoire and collaborated with choreographers Justin Peck, Twyla Tharp, Wayne McGregor, and Alexei Ratmansky. As a choreographer, he created Tango y Yo, Transcendence, Milongón, and The Apartment, commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His Reimagining Nijinsky, created as a CBA Fellow in 2021, became the foundation for Anima Animal, his first production as both dancer and producer.

Jennifer Harris is a writer, curator, and doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. Her research explores global modernism with particular interest in the relationships between abstraction and ornament, dance and visual art, and craft and design. Her dissertation analyzes the influence of dance and movement on 20th century American visual artists and institutions. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, the Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Artforum, and the New York Times. She previously worked in The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Virginia Johnson is a founding member and former principal dancer and artistic director of Dance Theatre of Harlem (DTH). Her 28-year performance career with DTH took her around the world, gaining acclaim in a broad range of works by George Balanchine, Michel Fokine, Glen Tetley and others. Her performances in Giselle, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Fall River Legend, were recorded for broadcast on network and cable television. After retiring as a dancer, she founded POINTE Magazine and served as editor-in-chief from 2000 to 2009. She served as artistic director of DTH from 2010 to 2023. She serves on the advisory board of Dance NYC and the board of Works & Process.

Tara Zahra is the Hanna Holborn Gray Professor of History at the University of Chicago, and the Roman Family Director of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. Her work has focused on the history of modern Europe, migration, globalization, nationalism, and the family. She is the author of Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars (Norton, 2023); and, with Pieter Judson, The Great War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe (Oxford, 2025). She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Descriptions of the projects and associated public programs can be found on CBA’s website.

About the Center for Ballet and the Arts
The Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University (CBA) is an international research institute for scholars and artists of dance and its related arts and sciences. It exists to inspire new ideas and new dances and to expand the way we think about the art form’s history, practice, and performance in the 21st century. The Center is made possible by founding support of the Mellon Foundation and ongoing support of NYU and CBA’s Center Circle.