Deborah Black is a dance theatre artist, writer, and teacher.

She is currently a PhD student in the Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies Program at UC Berkeley.

Deborah’s teaching and performance practice is informed by the meeting of dance and theatre and includes perceptual practices like Six Viewpoints improvisation, Grotowski, and Hamilton Floor Barre alongside postmodern philosophy. She seeks to unpack and deepen these intersections in her doctoral research bringing queer theory, decolonization, and poststructuralist philosophy into the fray.

She is fascinated by the nexus of writing and physical practice and has been in conversation/practice with poet Alyson Hallett and poet/mover Scott Thurston since 2017 and 2019, respectively. She was able to further develop her interdisciplinary approach as a non-fiction writer when she was invited to be a 2022 Gardarev Artist-in-Residence.

She founded and facilitated an on-line community of artists studying and researching the Six Viewpoints in 2018 and currently serves as a steward of Mary Overlie’s Legacy Project with Sophia Treanor, Nicolas Noreña, and Tony Perucci. A foundation part of this work has been creating a community-oriented dance theatre duet with Sophia Treanor. The instructions for this duet were left for them by Mary Overlie before her passing in 2020. This project has been generously supported by the Harold Clurman Center for New work in Movement and Dance Theater and the Fulton Foundation at Salisbury University. Ephemera had its North American premiere in June, 2023 and was restaged at Salisbury University in June 2025.

Deborah has an MA in Dance Education (NYU Steinhardt 2024) where she wrote a curriculum for an interdisciplinary liberal arts BA. She was a visiting professor at Salisbury University (MD) from 2024-20205. Previously, she taught an advanced curriculum course at Queens College (2022) and dance and theater at the Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Tilburg (2013-2015). She taught guest classes at the University of Toronto, Goldsmith’s University London, NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, Drama Studio London, The Stella Adler School, Capilano University, Ohio University, Skidmore College, Rowan University, James Madison University, University of South Florida, as well as private workshops in New York City and all across Europe.

While living in Rotterdam (NL) from 2013-16, she created and toured with the Tuning People (BE) and Ymist (NO).

She performed in Ann Hamilton’s exhibition, An Event of A Thread, at the Park Avenue Armory in New York as an associate artist with Anne Bogart’s SITI Company. Deborah adapted and performed two commissioned solos of Deborah Hay from 2008-2019 in the US and in Europe. She danced in the works of Mary Overlie, Susan Rethorst, Anneke Hansen, Peter Sciscioli, Lorelei Bayne, Naomi Goldberg-Haas, and Fitzgerald and Stapleton. In 2023 she traveled with Rebecca Lloyd Jones’ company to perform at the Festival Internacional de Teatro in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.

Deborah has collaborated extensively with Mary Pearson, Margot Basset, Davi Cohen, Siobhán K. Cronin, Geneviève Beth Grady, Caroline O’Meara, Kinderenvandevilla and Sasha Welsh. These pieces were presented at the TANK (NY), Judson Church (NY), Lucky Trimmer Tanz Performance Serie (DE), ArToll (DE), Fort 8 (BE), Roulette (NY), Joyce SoHo (NY), Manhattan Repertory Theatre (NY), Dixon Place (NY), Earthdance (MA), AUNTS (NY) and more.

Together with Siobhán K. Cronin received funding from the Jerome Foundation in 2010 to travel to Childress, TX to research the town, the people, and its landscape and develop their ethnographic performance making tools. She continues to be informed by this collaboration.

Deborah studied the Alexander Technique with June Ekman (2006-2013), Six Viewpoints with Mary Overlie (2011-2019), Grotowsky with Erica Fae and Stephen Wangh (2015) and has trained frequently with the SITI Company (2010-2017). She received a BFA with honors in dance with a second major in art history from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts (1999-2002).