Janice L. Ross is an American dance historian, critic, and educator. She is professor emeritus in Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University. Ross is the author of a number of books, including The Choreography of Environments: How the Home of Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design. Her research and writing focus on how dance engaged its social surround and how voices from the margin shape dominate trends. Ross also served as an editor of Dance Magazine.
Early life and education
Ross was born December 1950. She received her bachelor's degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. She completed a master's in Dance Education at Stanford University in 1975. For many years, she worked as a dance critic for the Oakland Tribune. Ross began her teaching career as a lecturer at Stanford University and entered the university's doctoral program in Education. She completed a PhD focused on dance education history in 1998.
Career
Ross was promoted to associate professor in 2004, and full professor in 2008. In 2010, Ross was invited to the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance as a Visiting Professor. In 2013, she was the founding faculty director of ITALIC, a yearlong residency academic program in the arts for first year students at Stanford.
Ross has served as an editor of Dance Magazine for about 20 years and a dance critic for the Oakland Tribune for approximately 10 years.
Critical reception
In a review in In Dance magazine, Marlena Gittleman said of Ross's book The Choreography of Environments, she "situates each Halprin as a choreographer in their respective field: Anna in dance and Larry in landscape architecture and urban design... Ross draws out resonances... and a bit of embodied imagination. In doing so, she follows the Halprins in modeling a receptivity to environment that invites readers to not only cognitively understand but also feel into the spaces she describes.... Finally, The Choreography of Environments tells a history of the Bay Area, one filled with tensions between postwar suburban life, 1960s countercultural aspirations, and liberal blind spots."
Doria E. Charlson in the Theatre Journal worte said the book "is an exciting project that reveals the depth of Anna and Lawrence "Larry" Halprin's co-creative processes using everyday objects... Bringing together dance studies, architecture and design, and art history, the book illustrates how the Halprins' domestic environment shaped their aesthetic sensibilities, their understanding of movement and choreography, and their ability to mobilize the ordinary as a tool for civic and societal change."
Personal life
Ross is Jewish, of Eastern European descent. She was married to attorney Keith Bartel. The couple married in 1979. He died in 2014. The couple had two children, their son having predeceased his father.
Awards
Dean's Award for Distinguished Lifetime Teaching at Stanford University (2021-2022)
Ross, Janice. The Choreography of Environments: How the Home of Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design. Oxford University Press. 2025. ISBN9780197775622.
Ingber, Judith Brin, ed. (2011). "Jewish Culture and Identity in the Russian Ballet: The Case of Leonid Jacobson". Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance. Wayne State University Press. ISBN9780814333303.
Ingber, Judith Brin, ed. (2008). Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance.
Chao, Chi-Fang (2021-11-02). "Susan Manning, Janice Ross and Rebecca Schneider (eds), Futures of Dance Studies". Dance Research. 39 (2): 277–278. doi:10.3366/drs.2021.0348. ISSN0264-2875. Future is a dynamic category. It reminds us of our relationship to both the present and the past, which are always in flux.... The editors Manning, Ross and Schneider have grouped the articles into seven themes....At first glance, these themes seem to be rather independent, but a closer look at the texts often uncovers a rhetoric of modernity mixed with post-colonial reflection or critique.
