Jill Gellerman (US, dance)

Jill is a leading Yiddish dance teacher and scholar whose research is situated at the intersection of Jewish studies, performance studies and dance ethnography. She received her master’s degree in dance from Ohio State University (1972), where she began to document Hasidic dance traditions, and continued her studies at New York University (1992), where she was a doctoral candidate in Performance Studies. Her research on men’s and women’s dance traditions among several Hasidic communities has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture.

Gellerman has danced, written about dance, and taught dance widely, from Western Illinois University to Yiddish Summer Weimar, and was on the faculty for many years at KlezKamp.