Lindsay Guarino, M.F.A.
Lindsay Guarino, M.F.A.
Associate Professor & Chair | Music, Theatre, and Dance
Lindsay Guarino (she/her) is an artist, educator and scholar. She has facilitated the dramatic growth of Salve’s dance program, including its new major focused in jazz studies. Her historical and embodied research interrogates the impacts of Whiteness on jazz history and practice through an antiracist lens, and investigates the intersections of jazz pedagogy, Africanist aesthetics, American history, identity and culture. As an educator and a leader, Lindsay prioritizes community at the heart of her practice and seeks to cultivate spaces where individuality is celebrated and recognized as vital to personal and collective growth. She is co-editor of Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches (University Press of Florida, 2014), and Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century (UPF, 2022), which was selected as the recipient for the National Dance Education Organization Ruth Lovell Murray Book Award for 2022. Through the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO), Lindsay developed and planned two special topics jazz dance conferences (2016 & 2019) and developed and taught Jazz Dance Theory and Practice for the Online Professional Development Institute. In 2020, she was interviewed in and consulted on Khadifa Wong’s documentary Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance, available on HBO Max.
Tara Brooke Watkins, Ph.D.
Tara Brooke Watkins, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Theatre | Music, Theatre and Dance
Program Coordinator, McAuley Scholar
Dr. Tara Brooke Watkins is a an assistant professor at Salve Regina University. She holds a masters in theatre education from Emerson College and a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from Tufts University. She is a story circle facilitator and advocate for its use in creating dialogue across boundaries. Using applied theatre techniques in collaboration with story circles, she promotes an embodied communal healing experience around oft-hushed topics like interracial relations, sexual violence, and body image. As a playwright, she develops theatre productions rooted in the story circle process. Such plays include The Bible Women’s Project, an official selection of the New York International Fringe Festival and winner of three national Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival Awards, Tulsa ’21: Black Wall Street about the Tulsa Race Massacre, The Father Bill’s Play about homelessness in Massachusetts and Shatter the Silence, a short play about sexual victimization in religious institutions. In 2019, she directed Sleeping Weazel’s The Audacity: Women Speak, which received the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Theatre Production (small/fringe).