Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.

I am an artist/scholar whose research includes both performed choreography and written work.
My focus is contemporary experimental dance post-1960 in the US and Japan, specifically American postmodern dance, Japanese butoh, and their legacies. My writing is grounded in embodied experiences arising from somatic movement and dance practices, placed in dialogue with theories of the body and philosophies of mind. My choreographic research explores perception, expanding the boundaries of the human, and, more recently, the intersections of language, movement, and technology. I also design costumes and other elements for my company’s stage work.

Essentially, I ask questions and try to answer them through a bodymind inquiry–meaning that body and mind are not separate. I could not write without physical practice, and I could not create movement without philosophical inquiry. Dance and philosophy share a preoccupation with thinking and action as they relate to time, space, and bodies. My research explores and attempts to uncover nuances in these areas. Below are a few examples of recent work:

• Experimental Dance and the Somatics of Language: Thinking in Micromovement
  (Palgrave, 2023) is a book about dance’s relationship to language. In this text, I draw
  upon my longtime studies with seminal figures in postmodern dance and butoh, and
  their language-body practices, to understand more broadly how language impacts a
  moving body on a felt level, even when such communication is unspoken.
• “Language Creates the Body Anew: Kasai Akira’s Post-Butoh” (Keio University Press,
  2025) discusses artist Kasai Akira’s use of spoken language and recent adoption of the
  term “post-butoh” to describe his post-pandemic performances. I bring notions of the
  post-human and language’s current media circulation to bear on Kasai’s broader call for
  an end to war, a commitment to non-discriminatory care for one another and the
  planet, and ultimately the question of how to live a life.
• humXn forms (2024) is a 30-minute dance work for 2 dancers and live percussion that
  was presented at the San Francisco International Arts Festival. Created using exchanges
  with ChatGPT, the piece explores human-human connection and human-technology
  interactions and shares the forms that arise as bodies transform and adapt to ever-
  changing conditions.
• Shifting Time (2019; 2026) is an evening-length dance-theater work exploring thoughts,
  perceptions, and experiences of human and environmental time. First presented in St. Louis and Berkeley in 2019, and scheduled to be reprised in 2026, the ensemble piece created in collaboration with Karlovsky & Company Dance weaves together solo, duet, and group movement sections, accompanied by live music and spoken word.

There’s more on my website!

What inspired you to pursue this area of study or creation?

Dance was something I had to do. Why else would someone pursue a career with so little financial stability? In a sense, it chose me. I did not find dance until high school—I started out with jazz and modern; I never studied ballet. The biggest inspirations were my early dance teachers: J. Parker Copely and Deborah Sipos (both now deceased). They showed me a way to live through the body and to express beauty and complexity. I have always enjoyed problem-solving and making things. I was initially a math major in college. However, I soon switched to art history, wishing to enter a field with more community and an arts focus (the school did not have a dance major at that time). During my junior year in London, I had the opportunity to choreograph my first piece, which had surprisingly positive results.

When I returned, feeling that I might soon be “too late” to pursue dancing, I refocused. Like many young people, I was interested in performing, not in history or theory, but that changed when I entered an MFA program. After graduating, and years of directing my dance company and presenting concerts, supported by part-time teaching and a host of other temporary jobs, I returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in performance studies. This course of academic study, combined with my embodied knowledge, opened new avenues for research that I have been able to pursue as a professor. I feel so grateful for the ongoing opportunities to live through my body as it changes and to share perspectives within a dynamic and ever-changing arts field.

What impact do you hope your work will have on your field and/or the broader community?

My hope is that I can contribute to uplifting the field of dance–both as practice and as written scholarship. Expressing nonverbal experiences in language can be difficult and intimidating. A goal of mine, in addition to simply celebrating the wonders of a moving body, is to make dance more accessible by encouraging spoken and written dialog and creating spaces for sharing movement experiences with others. In addition to my work at USF, I co-teach a community movement class in the Mission and co-facilitate a workgroup for artists in the East Bay.

How has your involvement with CRASE influenced and enhanced your professional journey?

While the performing arts are recognized in academic and university settings, I find there is often curiosity about how this field aligns with more traditional scholarship. One aspect of CRASE that I truly value is its recognition of creative research and the opportunity for me to engage with others across disciplines. Witnessing diverse research approaches is enlightening and sparks fresh ideas in my own work. Since joining the board last fall, I’ve been impressed by the dedication and enthusiasm of the directors and board members. Together, we work to highlight different research needs in support of this vital part of an academic career—an aspect that, for many of us (if not most), is what initially drew us to this path in the first place. Amidst other daily responsibilities, maintaining our research passion and finding a community can be challenging. CRASE’s workshops and public-facing opportunities have provided support, celebration, and deadlines (which I do find useful). I have gained momentum on my projects and a sense of shared purpose and respect. We are researchers and creators, but first and foremost we are people, driven to engage in ways that make a positive impact in the world. I am heartened and reminded of this every time I attend a CRASE event.

Please provide a brief overview of your research and/or creative work. You are welcome to focus on your most current work or, if you prefer, any particular work you’d like to highlight.

Broadly speaking, my research focuses on the development of interpretable statistical and computational techniques to analyze imaging and complex network data. My current work generally falls into three themes:

• Modeling and Analysis of Brain Imaging Data
• Modeling Social Dynamics and Influencers on Social Media
• Interpretable Machine Learning

I could spend a lot of time talking about my work in each of these areas, but I want to highlight two of my recent publications that have really had an impact on my current direction of work:

1. Torbati, M.E., Minhas, D.S., Laymon, C.M., Maillard, P., Wilson, J.D., Chen, C- L., Crainiceanu, C.M. DeCarli, C.S., Hwang, S.J. and Tudorascu, D. (2023) MISPEL: A deep learning approach for harmonizing multi-scanner matched neuroimaging data. Medical Imaging Analysis 89, 102926
2. Wilson, J.D., Gerlach, A., Aizenstein, H., and Andreescu, C. (2024) Sex matters: Acute functional connectivity changes as markers of remission in late-life depression differ by sex. Molecular Psychiatry 28 (12), 5228-5236.

These papers, different as they may seem, actually both highlight an important and often overlooked challenge in data science and analytics, which for lack of a better phrase I’ll call the “wrong data problem.” Particularly in today’s era of accessible deep learning apps like DeepSeek and ChatGPT, one could reasonably believe “the more data the better” for building predictive models (e.g., OpenAI’s strategy for ChatGPT). Though it is useful to have more information about an outcome we would like to predict, it is wrong to think that all available data should be used in the prediction, or that adding new data will necessarily help.

What I have learned from the above research is that we must understand and compensate for possible differences in data obtained from disparate sources, technologies, or people. The first publication above, for example, focused on the differences in brain images obtained from scanners from different companies (e.g., Philips, Siemens, etc.). The idea in that paper was to develop deep learning strategies to quantify and account for technical variability of images so that data from disparate scanners could be effectively analyzed together. The second publication I mentioned assessed sex-based differences in the brain’s response to anti-depressant medication for patients with late-life depression. We showed that the 24- hour change in how a person’s brain reacts to a new anti-depressant medication (a) was strongly predictive of whether or not that person would be remitted to the hospital in need of different medication, and (b) that the predictive ability of the brain scans was highly dependent on the person’s biological sex. In fact, remission prediction was 20% worse when males and females were put into the same model rather than in separate models. This work highlights the fact that in understanding the brain’s response to antidepressant treatment, medical professionals must account for sex differences; furthermore, not doing so may lead to devastating outcomes due to depression going improperly treated.

What inspired you to pursue this area of study or creation?

I have been interested in brain imaging analysis since I was a second year Ph.D. student at UNC Chapel Hill. I remember my first time diving into an imaging data set where the goal was to identify individuals with varying subtypes of ADHD (the “ADHD 200 challenge”). I threw every statistical method I knew at the time at this data and could do no better than a coin flip in making predictions. Though my predictions at the time were horrible, this experience drove me to want to figure out how to use more innovative methods in machine learning and network analysis, which I was studying in my Ph.D. thesis work, to make progress in the area. Since then, I have sought out and worked with many wonderful collaborators in psychiatry, neuroscience, biology, imaging, and physics from whom I have learned a tremendous amount about imaging analyses, neurodegenerative diseases, and mental illness. These collaborations have opened up incredibly exciting areas in medical research that I am excited to pursue.

What impact do you hope your work will have on your field and/or the broader community?

I am fortunate that I am a statistics and data science researcher and educator, where I have the opportunity both to work with incredible collaborators and to teach aspiring data scientists my own lessons learned in research. My overall hope is to show the broader community how to think about data and analyses, rather than just simply running the most accessible app or program to do the work for you. As I pointed out in my highlighted research, we cannot always assume that simply analyzing all the data we have our hands on is a good idea. Understanding individual differences, technological differences, and other sources of variation in the data we learn from is paramount to making informed decisions.

How has your involvement with CRASE influenced and enhanced your professional journey?

As a faculty member, it is easy to get carried away with preparing the next (hopefully) amazing lecture. Our devotion to excellent teaching and service to the university and broader community can make it challenging to make the time for research and scholarly work. Even when we do finally get that chance to sit down and work, it is easy to miss what amazing scholarly work everyone else at the university is up to. CRASE is a wonderful initiative at USF that focuses on motivating, making space for, and celebrating the research and scholarly work of faculty members at the university. In being part of CRASE, I have been able to witness the amazing research of my colleagues through meetings, writing workshops, and celebration events. It has opened my eyes to exciting interdisciplinary research opportunities at the university and has inspired me to investigate new areas in my own research that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought to do. I am excited to contribute to the CRASE initiative and hope to meet more of you through some of our events in the near future.