Elyan Jeanine Hill

Home institution

Southern Methodist University

Research project

Spirited Choreographies: Women's Ritual, Identity, and History-Making in Ewe Performance

Conceiving of spirit possession rituals as forms of critical social practice, the project engages with women’s associations that orchestrate festival and ritual events. These female ritual specialists propose solutions to perceptions of economic decline by transmitting moral and cultural knowledge to young women and generating narratives of enslavement, migration, and trade.

Profile

Elyan Hill is an assistant professor of African and African Diaspora art history. She received her PhD in world arts and cultures/dance from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts, her research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of the domestic and transatlantic slave trades in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Liberia and their diasporas.

Hill has received fellowships and grants from UCLA’s International Institute, the Fowler Museum, the West African Research Association (WARA), the Africana Research Center at Penn State, The Arts Council for the African Studies Association (ACASA), and The Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies and in the edited volume Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas published by Duke University Press. She also maintains a curatorial practice that embraces experimental ethnography and Black feminist ethics.

Course

HDS 3079: Dancing Diaspora: Black Feminist Art and Practice (spring 2023)