Faculty Bio - Carrie Stern

Carrie Stern (she/her)

Email: CStern@qcc.cuny.edu

Carrie Stern (Associate Professor Adjunct) teaches Introduction to the Art of Dance. Stern’s scholarship focuses on the choreographic process and on dance and society. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from NYU. Her examination of “whiteness” and dance performance has been expressed in papers on Latin Dance in the Social Ballroom, 1950’s rock’n’roll television dance programs, and a festival in Northwest Indiana featuring a humorous, Polish-themed performance parade.

From 2006-2012 Stern wrote “Dance Brooklyn” for the Brooklyn Eagle. Her essays on “The Savoy Ballroom,” on “Swing” and on “Michael Jackson” for the Dance Heritage “One Hundred Dance Treasures” website are currently archived by the Library of Congress. She has contributed to Dance Teacher, Dance Magazine, Dancer Magazine/Dance.com and the blog Classical TV, as well as other publications. “Memory-Recipe/Recipe-Memory” is a recipe for a dance-work and for food written with Magda Kaczmarska as part of Brooklyn Arts Exchange’s celebratory publication Recipes for Creation Over 30 Years.

Stern was a member of the 1980s experimental dance and music community working out of Chicago’s MoMing Dance and Arts Center and Links Hall. From this community came both the Chicago Contact Improvisation Group and the Chicago Improvisation Collective, both of which Stern helped found. She was a member of Dancycle, a collective of women choreographers/performers, creating both theatrical and site-specific dance works. Videos of her site-specific work, performed in Chicago Parks, are in the collection of the Chicago Public Library. She continues to have an active improvisation practice.

Stern has taught dance history and culture at Queens College and the School for New Learning at DePaul University, dance technique at F.I.T., and freshman writing at the New School. She was a Teaching Artist in Chicago and in New York public schools including serving as a mentor through the NYC Department of Education “Arts Matters” program. In 2009, with musician Jessica Lurie, she founded Yo! Poetry, a school-based, performance focused, dance, music, and poetry workshop that is partially supported by grants from the Brooklyn Arts Council. Stern also received a NYFA School Arts Partnership award for “The Play’s the Thing” hosted by a Brooklyn public school.

Stern was Co-Chair of the New York Dance Awards (The Bessies) Boundary Breaking subcommittee for 6 years and has sat on arts panels for both the Westchester and the Brooklyn Arts Councils.