Photo: Lisa Attard, courtesy of Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti

Dr Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel is a dance scholar, educator and published author.

Supervised by the esteemed dance scholar and critic Dr Giannandrea Poesio (1960-2017), she was awarded a PhD for Transmodern Dance Practices: Angelin Preljocaj, Mauro Bigonzetti and revisions of Les Noces (1923). Throughout her twenty years of teaching in Higher Education, her interests lie in dance/ballet histories (20th and 21st centuries). As academic integrity lead, she offered academic excellence across university-validated  and professional programmes of study offered by the Royal Academy of Dance’s Faculty of Education (2005-2023). Kathrina was a board member of the Executive Board of the Society of Dance History Scholars (USA) (2012 – 2018), now known as the Dance Studies Association.

Alongside her scholarly work, Kathrina set up three-fortyone dances in 2003, touring Fringe Festivals of Edinburgh (2004) and Brighton (2007) as well as Malta’s St James Cavalier Centre for Creativity (2006) and various London venues. Since 2008, Kathrina has presented at conferences in the United States, Australia, South Africa and Europe. Moreover she has taught at various international universities, including  the University of Malta, Kingston University (UK), as well as Rhodes University and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She has examined doctoral dissertations for global institutions.

Kathrina has published in the South African Dance Journal, Dance Chronicle, the Sunday Times of Malta and the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance (2019). She edited the RAD’s Focus on Education between 2016-2023. Together with Dr Jill Nunes Jensen (Los Angeles), she co-edited Network of Pointes (as part of the series of Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, volume published by the Dance Studies Association, 2015) and published the seminal text on contemporary ballet, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (Oxford University Press). She continues to publish on ballet and pedagogy, working on a new anthology (The Oxford Handbook of Ballet Pedagogy, forthcoming) with Dr Adesola Akinleye.

Dialogue in dance discourses remains at the centre of Kathrina’s practice. In May 2016, Farrugia-Kriel and Nunes Jensen organized ‘Contemporary Ballet: Exchanges, Connections and Directions’ a seminal conference at New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, and Barnard College at Columbia University. During her tenure as Head of Research at the RAD, she conceptualised and steered conferences in London (October 2009), Sydney (December 2016), Brisbane (January 2018), and London (September 2021). She curated the Guest Lecture Series (2016-2023), bringing together scholars from North America, Europe, and Australasia.

Podcasts:

Links: Treasures from Malta Season 1 Episode 5 ; Why Dance Matters, Season 4 Episode 6  ; ResDance, Series 3 Episode 7 (Performance Histories with Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel