Professional Summary
Sammy Roth is a performance scholar and 2026-28 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center. Her research uses dance studies and digital humanities methodologies to examine the embodied politics of popular performances and their media circulations. Focusing on feminized aesthetics, her work particularly uncovers covert manifestations of white nationalism in joyful physical practices ranging from competitive dance to beauty influencing.
Sammy’s current projects explore questions of power and performance through scholarly writing and immersive digital sites. Her book project, Dancing to Make War, examines the intersection of popular dance and the military industrial complex in the Ohio Valley region from World War I to present day. Her current digital project, Transmediating White American Femininity, reveals aesthetic and political economic pipelines from competitive dance to tradwife/motherhood influencing and their implicit role in the rise of Christian nationalism in the United States. Both projects build on nearly a decade of archival and ethnographic research on youth competitive dance practices in Louisville, Kentucky and the surrounding areas.
In addition to her research, Sammy has taught undergraduate courses on art as social practice and performance theory at UCLA as well as pre-professional and professional dancers in community settings in New York City. Her courses merge theory and practice at the intersections of physical movement, digital exploration, and civic engagement.
Beyond research and teaching, Sammy has been a dancer in experimental performances and held a variety of arts administration positions in New York City and Los Angeles since 2011. Her performance credits span venues from Highways Performance Space (LA) and St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (NYC) to the Suzanne Dellal Center (Tel Aviv) and the European Capital of Culture Festival (Wroclaw), among others. Most recently she performed in technologically-mediated rituals combining poetry, dance, and vocal performance with Joey De Jesus and B Taylor. As an administrator, she has produced performances for emerging and established artists and institutions, including for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and community-engaged events with Indigenous artists in Los Angeles.
Education
PhD: University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) 2026 (Culture and Performance)
MA: New York University (NYU) 2018 (Performance Studies)
BFA: Ohio University 2011 (Dance)
Research and Practice Interests
performance/dance studies, digital humanities, critical race/whiteness studies, media studies, gender studies, American studies, right-wing studies
Publications
Peer Reviewed Publications
Roth, Sammy (2025). Institutionally Appointed Fan-Athletes: The Hegemonic Performativity, Commodification, and Consumption of Scholastic Dance Teams. Transformative Works and Cultures, 45More Information
Roth, Sammy, Miya Shaffer, and Tria Blu Wakpa (2024). Toward Becoming Good Relatives: The Practice of Not-Dancing to Centre Indigenous Presence in the Dance Classroom. Performance Matters, 10 (2) More Information
Roth, Sammy, and Tria Blu Wakpa (2023). Performativity, Possibility, and Land Acknowledgements in Academia: Community-Engaged Work as Decolonial Praxis in the COVID-19 Context. Performance Matters, 8 (2) More Information
Book Chapter
Roth, Sammy (2023). Varsity Spirit's Propertied, White Settler Femininity. In Dance in US Popular Culture. Routledge
Honors and Awards
2026 Randy Martin Prize Cultural Studies Association
2025 Filson Institute Research Fellow Filson Historical Society
2018 Selma Jeanne Cohen Award Dance Studies Association