16 Facts About Lynn Garafola

Lynn Theresa Garafola was born on December 12,1946 and is an American dance historian, linguist, critic, curator, lecturer, and educator.

The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Lynn Garafola spent the following year in Quito, Ecuador, studying Latin American literature and teaching English.

Lynn Garafola soon switched her field from Spanish to comparative literature, which she found more intellectually stimulating, and began regular attendance at dance performances in the city.

Lynn Garafola served as co-chair of the Department of Dance at Barnard from July 2014 to July 2016.

Lynn Garafola continues to serve on orals and dissertation committees in History and Theatre, and remains active in the Harriman Institute.

An autodidact in dance history, Lynn Garafola has taught numerous courses at Barnard in Western theatrical dance from the Renaissance to the 1960s.

Lynn Garafola has directed numerous projects on nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics in ballet as well as in modern, contemporary, African-American, social, and national dance forms.

Lynn Garafola has a deep commitment to guiding and developing dance history scholars in work that is empirically rich and that opens new windows onto the past.

In time, Lynn Garafola's dissertation metamorphosed into a history book, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, published in 1989.

Lynn Garafola has made many appearances on television and public radio that have resulted in written transcripts of her commentary and addresses.

All of Lynn Garafola's writings have been motivated by her belief in the centrality of dance and its importance to scholarship and the cultural life of a city, a nation, and communities throughout the world.

Lynn Garafola has delivered dozens of lectures and public presentations on a great many topics in dance history.

Since 1988, Lynn Garafola has been an active member of the Society of Dance History Scholars, serving as editor of its monograph series Studies in Dance History, chair of its fundraising committee, chair of its editorial board, and a judge on its annual prize committee on several occasions.

Lynn Garafola has been active in the Dance Critics Association, the Congress on Research in Dance, the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lynn Garafola has been a panelist and judge in programs sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Library of Congress, and various universities, publishers, and other organizations.

In 1980, Lynn Garafola married Eric Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.