Faculty Profile: Deborah Goffe

Deborah A Goffe
Executive Director of the Austin Arts Center and Artist-in-Residence in Theater and Dance
Phone: (860) 297-2447	Office Location: Austin Arts Center 228
Send e-mail to Deborah A Goffe	Personal web page
Trinity College faculty member since 1997

Degrees:

M.F.A., California Inst. of the Arts
M.A., Wesleyan Univ.
B.F.A., Univ. of the Arts-Philadelphia

Deborah Goffe is a dance maker, performer, educator, and performance curator. Prior to arriving at Trinity, Deborah served as Associate Professor of Dance and Performance Curation and Dance Program Coordinator at Hampshire College. Deborah’s current role as Executive Director of the Austin Arts Center and Artist-in-Residence of Theater and Dance is informed by her enduring commitments to world-making, support of vibrant local arts ecosystems, and the role of curatorial practice in those processes.

She is founder of Scapegoat Garden, a New England-based creative engine that has functioned as a primary artistic and curatorial vehicle since 2002. Deborah’s artistic works have been performed in homes, gardens, galleries, as well as in regional, national, and international performance festivals and venues. In 2022, she was a Creative Capital Awardee and recipient of a New Work New England grant from New England Foundation for the Arts for her current project, Liturgy|Order|Bridge. She is a past Massachusetts Cultural Council, Connecticut Office of the Arts, and Greater Hartford Arts Council artist fellow, and was awarded the Rebecca Blunk Fund Award by New England Foundation for the Arts. She has also been honored for Distinguished Achievement by the Connecticut Dance Alliance and Lifetime Achievement by The Greater Hartford Arts Council.

Alongside her MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from California Institute of the Arts, Deborah earned an MA in Performance Curation from Wesleyan University’s Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance (ICPP). Her curatorial research examines and makes visible formal and informal cultural networks that emerge outside perceived cultural centers or among artists with marginalized identities. She was also a 2019 ICPP Ford Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and served as lead author and consultant on the ICPP Performing Artist Case Study project, funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Her book chapter, "See Me Here: Defining Black Space at the Intersection of Artistic and Curatorial Practices in Privy," was published in Black Art and Aesthetics: Relations, Interiors, Reckonings by Bloomsbury Publishing in December 2023.

curriculum vitae

Lectures, Panels, Publications:

"See Me Here: Defining Black Space at the Intersection of Artistic and Curatorial Practices in Privy," Black Art and Aesthetics: Relations, Interiors, Reckonings

ed. Michael Kelly and Monique Roelofs

(Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming fall 2023)

"Nestings: Experimental Infrastructures for Performance,"

Panelist with Joshua Rubin-Levy, Jumatatu poe, Alma Quintana, and Noémie Solomon, as part of the 6th Annual Curating Performance Symposium

hosted by the Department of Performance Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts (2022)

"Afrofuturism as Expression: Literature, Dance and Black Abstraction,"

Artist Panelist with André Zachary and Nana Nkweti,

moderated by Derek Nnuro and hosted by the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art (2021)

Consultant and Lead Author, Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance Performing Artist Case Studies (Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, 2019-2021)

Engaged 4 artists (Kaneza Schaal, Jennifer Harge, Tosh Basco, Jumatatu poe) in a series of interviews and analysis of their entrepreneurial strategies, economic drivers, models for career development, and potential strategies for philanthropic support over the arc of their careers

"A Turn of the Head: Mapping Our Own Ecologies"

keynote speaker and professional development workshop facilitator for New England Foundation

as part of the Arts' Regional Dance Development Initiative (RDDI) Pre-Lab Forum (Wesleyan University, 2019)

"Orienting Ourselves to See: Mapping Nested Dance Ecosystems as Curatorial Practice in New England,"

paper presentation at Dance Studies Conference

(Northwestern University, 2019)

"Privy: an invitation to reframe vulnerability,"

paper presentation at the Collegium for African Diaspora Dance Conference: Dance Black Joy

(Duke University, 2018)

"The Chick Austin Years: A Window into Hartford's Cultural Legacy and Potentiality,"

a published chapter in Connecticut Dance Compendium: Essays, Articles, and Memories

as part of the Connecticut Dance Alliance Dance History Project (2016)

"Home, a Place Between," Kinebago, Issue No.5 (Winter 2016)

Creative Work:

Liturgy|Order|Bridge — With support from Creative Capital and NEFA’s New Work New England, this currently in-process work asks what it might meant to engage dance as faith practice, performance as communal ceremony, performance space as consecrated site, and audience as a fellowship of shared witness, place, and inheritance.

ICA Boston (2022)
Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University (2020)
Northampton Community Arts Trust (2018, 2019)
Hampshire College (2018)

Privy — A multimedia solo work framed within an intimate home performances (in-person and as an internet-mediated experiences), and examines all that is catalyzed when we bring another into personal confidence around unspoken familial and societal legacies

Virtual performance presented in collaboration with the Center for Afrofuturist Studies and Public Space One in Iowa City, IA (2020)
A series of intimate performances for 35-40 guests in a home space in Holyoke, MA (2016-2019)

Reaction Bubble — Inspired by the study of Proxemics, this project emerged from collaboration between interactive media duo LoVid (Kyle Lapidus and Tali Hinkis), ceramicist Matt Towers, and Deborah Goffe; commissioned by Real Art Ways, with generous funding from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (2017)