Tria Blu Wakpa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research and teaching center community-engaged, decolonizing, and dance studies methodologies to examine the politics and practices of dance and other movement modes—such as theatrical productions, athletics, and yoga—for Indigenous peoples in and beyond structures and institutions of confinement. She is a mother, scholar, poet, and practitioner of Indigenous dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous Sign Language), martial arts, and yoga. Her first book project, Choreographies in Confinement: Native American Bodies as Battlegrounds, Institutions as War, historically and politically contextualizes dance, theatrical productions, basketball, and/or yoga at four sites on Lakota lands: a former Indian boarding school, men and women’s prisons, and a tribal juvenile hall. Her writings have been translated into French and Portuguese and appear in academic journals and books. In addition to her research, she is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief for Race and Yoga, the first peer-reviewed and open-access journal in the emerging field of critical yoga studies.
In 2023, Professor Blu Wakpa’s article, “From Buffalo Dance to Tatanka Kcizapi Wakpala, 1894-2020: Indigenous Human and More-than-Human Choreographies of Sovereignty and Survival,” won the American Society for Theatre Research’s Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize “for the best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal or edited collection.” This same year, she was named the Fulbright Association’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Dance Lecture Awardee. She has held major fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Program. At UCLA, several entities have supported her research: the Academic Senate, the Center for the Study of Women, the Institute of American Cultures, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and the School of the Arts and Architecture.
Professor Blu Wakpa engages with people and organizations at UCLA, in Los Angeles, and throughout the U.S. At UCLA, she is affiliated with the American Indian Studies Center and the Center for Community Engagement and serves as the Community Engagement Council representative for the Institute of American Cultures. She has taught a wide range of interdisciplinary and community-engaged classes at public, private, tribal, and carceral institutions and collaborated with California tribal and Lakota people on exhibitions and performances. For her pedagogical projects that bridge the academy and off-campus communities, she has received support from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, UCLA’s Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars and Center for the Advancement of Teaching, and the University of Pittsburg’s Radical Teacher Fellowship. In 2023, the mayor appointed her to the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission. She currently serves on three boards in Los Angeles that further culturally relevant education and opportunities for Native children in grades K-12.