Jennifer Fisher

Jennifer Fisher’s latest book, The Routledge Introduction to Ballet, its culture and issues, explores ballet in terms of cultural practices, ethnicity, exclusion, revolution, secular ritual, and audience perspective. Her first book, Nutcracker Nation: How an Old World Ballet Became a Christmas Tradition in the New World (2003, Yale) won the de la Torre Bueno Prize Special Citation for an exploration of a ballet as ritual, relating it to spirituality, a theme covered in the ethnographic memoir Ballet Matters: A Cultural Memoir of Dance Dreams and Empowering Realities (McFarland, 2019). She is co-editor, with Anthony Shay, of When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders (Oxford University Press, 2009). With a master's degree from York University in Toronto and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside, she previously taught at York University and at Pomona College, Claremont, California, and was for ten years a regular contributor of dance writing to the Los Angeles Times.

Fisher’s scholarly articles range in topic from gender and dance, whiteness and ballet, and Anna Pavlova, to the history and effects of so-called lyrical dance on dancer training. She has also contributed op-ed columns to the New York Times, and in the Los Angeles Times wrote commentaries about the campaign to end “yellowface” portrayals in ballet. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-fisher-nutcracker-chinese-dance-revisionism-20181211-story.html; and on the continued use of blackface in Russian ballet https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-12/blackface-bolshoi-copeland-twitter-tweet

As founding editor of Dance Major Journal in 2010, Fisher has produced many online issues available at https://escholarship.org/uc/dmj. DMJ features writing by dance majors, graduate students, and guest professionals, illuminating viewpoints, research, and experiences from a dancer perspective.

A former dancer and actor, Fisher also had careers as a travel writer, film critic, magazine editor, television critic, and media commentator for CBC radio in Canada. She made a few unlikely comebacks in the arena of performance later, appearing on the sidelines of the Mariinsky Ballet's Romeo and Juliet and La Bayadère, and later, alongside Mikhail Baryshnikov in David Gordon's "The Matter," which used La Bayadère music and was remounted for "PastForward," a White Oak Project. She has guest lectured for American Ballet Theatre, the National Ballet of Canada, San Francisco Ballet, and many other organizations, also appearing in interviews for NPR, on ABC's "Nightline," and “CBS Sunday Morning,” and BBC News Hour. A segment on the history of pointe shoes with Josephine Lee appears on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HaElF59HFM&t=8s

Fisher holds the distinction of being the only self-appointed ballet coroner to hold regular inquests into the death of Giselle.