• email: cdunagan@csulb.edu
• office phone: 562.985.7040
• office: DC-F206
  

Colleen Dunagan is an Associate Professor of Dance at California State University, Long Beach. She holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from the University of California, Riverside and a B.A. in Dance and English Literature from Hamilton College, Clinton, New York.  At CSULB Dr. Dunagan regularly teaches Viewing Dance, Introduction to Modern Dance, Movement Analysis, Dance in Film, Improvisation, and three graduate courses: Seminar in Dance, Criticism and Analysis of Dance, and Dance History.  She serves as the M.F.A. Advisor/Coordinator and Project Report Writing Advisor.

Professor Dunagan’s main research interests are dance philosophy/aesthetics and dance in film/television.  Her dissertation examined the tradition of twentieth-century Western dance aesthetics from the perspective of post-structuralist critical theories in order to reveal how dance challenges Romantic and Enlightenment notions of art and author. Her article, “Dance, Knowledge, and Power” appeared in a special issue of Topoi: An International Review of Philosophy.  In the article, she recuperates Susanne Langer’s philosophy of dance through a merging of Langer's ideas with elements of phenomenology and pragmatism. 

Dr. Dunagan's current research project looks at the proliferation of dance in commercial formats, specifically the presence of dance in television commercials. Investigating links between Western theatrical dance practices, film musicals, vernacular dance forms, and dance-based commercials, she examines how dance contributes to popular culture and serves the advertising format as a meaning-maker.  Her article, “Performing the Commodity-Sign: Dancing in the Gap,” appeared in Dance Research Journal 39 no. 2 (Winter 2007).  In the article she examines the ways in which The Gap’s dance-based commercials (khakis, that’s holiday, and West Side Story) employ dance and the popular art of the musical in order to subvert common positioning strategies used in advertising.  Her writing on dance in commercials also appears in The International Journal of Arts in Society and has been presented nationally at conferences, including SDHS, CORD, and the Popular Culture Association.

In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Dunagan continues to choreograph, producing both concert work and video dance.  Most recently, she collaborated with film director Gregory Crosby to create Promiscuity, an experimental short film that through the vehicle of choreography takes a playful and somewhat ironic look at women’s relationship to romance novels.  In 2005 she co-founded ThreeWay, a dance collective operating between Seattle/New York/Los Angeles, with Sue Hogan and Erin Mitchell.  Her choreography has been performed at Highways (Santa Monica, CA), The Chamber Theatre (Seattle, WA), University Settlement (NYC), Santa Ana College, Mt. San Jacinto College, CSU Long Beach, and the University of California, Riverside. She is a practitioner of contact improvisation, which she practices locally in Los Angeles in addition to traveling to festivals/workshops in Seattle and San Francisco.  Her other movement practices include Bartenieff Fundamentals and contemporary modern technique. 

Dr. Dunagan has served as a reviewer for the Dance Resource Center of Greater Los Angeles’ Lester Horton Awards and is a member of the Society of Dance History Scholars, the Congress on Research in Dance, and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.  In 2001-02 she worked as an independent researcher for the National Dance Education Organization’s archival project on dance education.

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