Nicole Daunic
Nicole Daunic '03 is a dancer, Performance Studies scholar and initiator of the post-anthropocentric performance project and collective research platform Another Audience
Biography
Daunic interrogates and reimagines roles, modes of representation, and economies of attention in dance in order to expose and explore gaps in the sensorium, zones of indeterminacy, and ways of being and doing that allow other forms of collectivity to become practicable. Her current research and practice take place at the intersection of movement, critical dance studies, performance theory, posthumanist feminism, and ecology. In 2021, she initiated Another Audience, a platform that invites artists and communities to consider performance within a more-than-human arena. The project serves as an incubator for creative experimentation in dance that pushes the limits of human-centric notions of time, space, aesthetics, subjectivity, relationality, and what it means to be “human.”
Daunic earned her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University, where her research contemplated the entwinement of movement, power and economy through a (re)examination of the role of contemporary experimental dancers– their labor, creative production, corporeal intelligence and critical navigations–in the context of neoliberal capitalism. Daunic’s teaching style emphasizes the symbiotic value of practice-based and theoretical approaches to learning and research and encourages interdisciplinary discourse and methodologies. MAT(T)ER, produced in collaboration with Hilary Clark, was most recently supported by Lower Manhattan Community Council Residency/Week and The Chocolate Factory Theater creative residency. In addition to performing in New York City and abroad with choreographers including Luciana Achugar, Biba Bell, Walter Dundervill, Susan Sgorbati, Mårten Spångberg, and Gillian Walsh, Daunic has served as co-editor of Movement Research’s online publication Critical Correspondence and a recipient of the Corrigan Fellowship.
She has been a recurring visiting faculty member at Bennington since 2018.