Historical Dance Program,
Faculty

Peggy Murray is a dancer, scholar and instructor. She holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from Ohio University's School of Interdisciplinary Arts. A former ballet and jazz dancer, Murray is now dedicated to historical dance. She works extensively with Renaissance and Baroque dance, and studies the role and development of dancing in Europe and the Americas during the colonial period. Murray has choreographed university and professional operas, including Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Monteverdi's L'Orfeo for Pegasus Early Music. She has also been a faculty member for the Baroque Opera Workshop at Queens College, the Amherst Early Music Festival, and the Madison Early Music Festival. Murray co-founded and co-directed three iterations of the Encuentro Internacional de Danzas del Pasado, an academic conference on historical dance in Mexico City. She has performed and taught in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Argentina.

Dorothy Olsson received her B. M. in Music Education, major in Bassoon, from the Crane School of Music (State University College at Potsdam, NY), and her Master of Music in Musicology from Manhattan School of Music. She completed her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at New York University, with a dissertation on early twentieth-century dance, entitled Arcadian Idylls; Dances of Early Twentieth-Century American Pageantry. For ten years, she was an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Dance Education at New York University. Dr. Olsson’s article on “Seventeenth-Century Dance” appears in A Performer’s Guide to Seventeenth-Century Music (ed. Stewart Carter, Schirmer Books); a second edition of this volume was published in 2012. Dorothy is the founder and director of The New York Historical Dance Company (www.newyorkhistoricaldance.com), a group of dancers devoted to the study, recreation and performance of dances from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Costumed in period clothing, the company performs social and theatrical dances from Europe and America. The company has performed with Piffaro, Parthenia—A Consort of Viols, the Philadelphia Classical Symphony, and the New Dance Group. Most recently, the company presented a lecture-demonstration on Renaissance dance at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Dr. Olsson has given numerous workshops in historical dance and has choreographed for the Stony Brook Opera, Folger Consort, Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, Mannes Camerata (Mannes College of Music), Wake Forest University and Princeton University. Dorothy has choreographed for and/or directed several historical theatrical productions at the Amherst Early Music Festival and at the Country Dance and Song Society Early Music Week. Dr. Olsson has co-authored (with Kaspar D. Mainz) seven books on historical dance. She has also taught Baroque dance at the "Rethinking Bach" workshop at Tokai University in Tokyo, Japan.

Jennifer Meller is a musician and dancer, and enjoys exploring connections between the two disciplines. She works with early music ensembles in the Bay Area to create performances, reconstruct ancient operas, teach classes and organize workshops and events centered around early dance and music. She has taught master classes in historical dance at numerous schools and universities throughout California and works regularly in collaboration with the Educational Department of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale and with the San Francisco Early Music Society. She is Professor of Baroque Dance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and teaches Baroque Dance classes online to students around the world. Ms. Meller became Artistic Director of long-standing historical dance company Dance Through Time in 2019.