Introduction

Biography

Havana Barbie is the alter ego of Dr. Melissa Blanco Borelli who teaches in the Dance, Film and Theatre department at the University of Surrey. Previously, she was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar in the Music and Theatre Arts department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has also taught at UCLA, UC Riverside and Citrus College. She holds a PhD in Dance History and Theory (now Critical Dance Studies) from the University of California, Riverside, an MA in Communications Management from the University of Southern California, and a BA in Music and International Relations from Brown University. Her forthcoming book entitled She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body sets up a history of the mulata through social dance and everyday embodied knowledges in Havana from the nineteenth century to now. She is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology called The Oxford Handbook of Dance on the Popular Screen which features essays about dance in film, television, music videos, and video games.

Before her academic career, Dr. Blanco Borelli worked in the entertainment industry, coordinating soundtracks and music licensing for Overbrook Entertainment (Will Smith’s company at Universal Studios), wrote liner notes for Rhino Records, and taught foreign languages (Spanish, French and Italian) to celebrities and students at a private high school in Santa Monica, California. She has taught and performed Afro-Cuban sacred dance in Los Angeles, New York, and Havana, Cuba, and she dances/performs other Latino/Latin American social dance forms: salsa, son, danzon, rumba, tango, cumbia as well as other Colombian folkloric forms. As her alter ego, Havana Barbie, she performs one woman cabaret shows based on the aesthetic of the cabaretera movies from the golden age of Mexican cinema. She is also writing a performance piece on sixteenth century Spanish mulata hermaphrodite Elena/o de Cespedes. Read more