Annelies Van Assche obtained a joint doctoral degree in Art Studies and Social Sciences in 2018 for studying the working conditions of European contemporary dance artists in her FWO-funded research on Dancing Precarity. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of Art History, Musicology and Theater Studies of Ghent University and lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp’s dance department. Her research focuses on the multidimensional relations between labor and aesthetics in contemporary dance. In 2023, she received a senior postdoctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) for an interdisciplinary project that examines the interrelations between transgressive behavior and contemporary dance, particularly with the European higher arts education context. She is the author of Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance. Dancing Precarity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) and co-editor of (Post)Socialist Dance. A Search for Hidden Legacies (Bloomsbury 2024, forthcoming). Prior to her academic career, she was production and tour manager at contemporary dance school P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels from 2011 until 2014.
Her research interests entail contemporary dance and performance in the European context, especially through the lens of the sociology of labor and culture: art-as-work, the working conditions in the cultural sector, the relationship between aesthetics and precarity, the creative process within the dance world, collaborative work and commoning, decentralizing cultural production and knowledge production, the relationship between the performing arts and society (capitalism, neoliberalism, post-Fordism, social acceleration, flexibility, burnout, networks, institutionalization ...), among other things.
She co-edited a special issue of Dance Research Journal on Work (with)out Boundaries: Dance and Precarity (2019) with Katharina Pewny, Simon Leenknegt and Rebekah Kowal, and a special issue of Documenta on Choreographic (Re)Collections: Archiving Dance in Flanders with Timmy De Laet (2021). Her research has been published in journals as The Drama Review, Dance Research Journal, Performance Research, Research in Dance Education, Poetics, Dance Research and several book chapters. She is on the editorial board of the academic journal Documenta (since 2018) and she is a member of the board of directors of the Flemish cultural magazine Rekto:Verso (since 2020). She is a founding member of CoDa | Cultures of Dance - Research Network for Dance Studies, a scientific research community supported by Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). Furthermore, she is an active member of the research group S:PAM and elected member of the Young Academy of Flanders.
