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Join us virtually to meet our fifth Artist as Instigator, Dr. ShaDawn “Boobie” Battle, and learn more about her work. Multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and activist ShaDawn was selected from a competitive pool of 86 applicants and her work includes documentary films, performances, and public talks. Her creative practice is rooted in transformative justice and creating platforms for the most marginalized communities to engage in truth-telling practices.

ShaDawn is currently directing and producing a docuseries titled “Footwork Saved My Life: The Evolution of Chicago Footwork.” Through this work, Battle has amassed nearly 200 oral history interviews, offering rich insight into the stories, histories, memories, and community activities that represent the Chicago footwork dance scene that will inform her new work during the residency.

ShaDawn will leverage her residency to develop, and create a new work, “Place, Space, and Werkz (working title),” a multi-dimensional project that weaves together oral histories and scholarship about the evolution of Chicago footwork dance through workshops, creative placemaking, and performances that examine the art form in relation to oppressive systems, practices, and structures.

About Dr. ShaDawn “Boobie” Battle

South Side of Chicago native and HBCU product, Dr. ShaDawn “Boobie” Battle is an Assistant Professor of Critical Ethnic and Black Studies at Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH). She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Justice Renewal Initiative (a Chicago-based nonprofit that tackles racial inequity in the Criminal Justice System). ShaDawn earned her Ph.D. in literature from The University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include African-American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Black feminist studies, critical race epistemology, and hip-hop Studies. ShaDawn’s most recent scholarly research examines the inexpressibility of Black girls’ pain, and the relationship between Black male killings by the hand of police, and epistemic injustice.

ShaDawn’s long-term research project focuses on Chicago Footwork, which she considers an embodied vernacular dance of liberation. She is concurrently directing and producing a forthcoming docuseries on the culture and art form (of which she is a practitioner), titled, “Footwork Saved My Life: The Evolution of Chicago Footwork.” The documentary examines how each of the five generations of Chicago Footwork is catalyzed by the structural forces that shape the lives of Black youth on Chicago’s South and West sides, such as socially engineered gang rivalries and housing injustice.

ShaDawn teaches a wide array of Black Literature and Black Studies courses, with emphasis on the Black musical tradition, state-sanctioned violence, chattel slavery, Black women and girls, and Black liberation politics. Her latest course, for instance, Giving “Whiteness” a U.T.I., seeks to understand, theorize, and interrogate the myth of white supremacy, to impede its efficacy within various national social bodies. ShaDawn is committed to social justice and to curating Ellisonian “manholes,” or underground spaces wherein the wide gamut of Black cultural expression can exist outside of objectifying and dehumanizing technologies that strip Black folks of identity and spaces of belonging.

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