BRENDA DIXON GOTTSCHILD is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner, 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of American Performance.  

Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award  (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016; a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017); the Dance Magazine Award (2022); the New York University Hemispheric Center for American Politics and Performance 2022 Mellon Foundation Artist in Residency Award; and the 2022 Dance History Scholars Scholarly Achievement Award.

A self-described anti-racist cultural worker utilizing dance as her medium, she is a freelance writer, consultant, performer, and lecturer; a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine; and Professor Emerita of dance studies, Temple University.  As an artist-scholar she coined the phrase, “choreography for the page,” to describe her embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.

Nationwide and abroad she curates post-performance reflexive dialogues, writes critical performance essays, performs self-created solos, and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild, in a genre they developed and titled “movement theater discourse.