Janice Ross

Janice L. Ross is an American dance historian and emerita professor of dance at Stanford University.¹² Ross is the author of a number of books, including The Choreography of Environments: How the Home of Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design. Ross also served as an editor of Dance Magazine and a dance critic for the Oakland Tribune.

Ross was born about 1951,³ the daughter of Arthur and Grace Ross. She received her bachelor's degree in art history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973. This was followed by a master's in dance history/curriculum and teacher education in 1975 from Stanford University and a PhD in the history of dance education in 1998.⁴

After receiving her doctorate, Ross began her teaching career at Stanford University as lecturer in the dance division. She was promoted to associate professor in 2004, and full professor in 2008. In 2010, Ross was invited to the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance as a Visiting Professor.⁴ In 2013, she was the founding faculty director of Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture, Stanford's freshman arts immersion program.⁵

Ross has published and lectured significantly on the lives and works of Anna Halprin and Lawrence Halprin⁶ and Leonid Yakobson.⁷

Ross has served as an editor of Dance Magazine for about 20 years and a dance critic for the Oakland Tribune for approximately 10 years.⁸⁹

In a review in In Dance magazine, Marlena Gittleman said of Ross's book The Choreography of Environments, she "situates each Halprin as a choreographer in their respective field: Anna in dance and Larry in landscape architecture and urban design... Ross draws out resonances... and a bit of embodied imagination. In doing so, she follows the Halprins in modeling a receptivity to environment that invites readers to not only cognitively understand but also feel into the spaces she describes.... Finally, The Choreography of Environments tells a history of the Bay Area, one filled with tensions between postwar suburban life, 1960s countercultural aspirations, and liberal blind spots."⁶

Doria E. Charlson in the Theatre Journal worte said the book "is an exciting project that reveals the depth of Anna and Lawrence "Larry" Halprin's co-creative processes using everyday objects... Bringing together dance studies, architecture and design, and art history, the book illustrates how the Halprins' domestic environment shaped their aesthetic sensibilities, their understanding of movement and choreography, and their ability to mobilize the ordinary as a tool for civic and societal change."¹⁰

Ross is Jewish, of Eastern European descent.⁸ She was married to attorney Keith Bartel.⁹ The couple married in 1979.³ He died in 2014.¹¹ The couple had two children,⁸⁹ their son having predeceased his father.¹¹

• Dean's Award for Distinguished Lifetime Teaching at Stanford University (2021-2022)²
• Honorary Fellow of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Israel (2022)¹²
• Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship, Italy (2022)
• NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts Mellon Fellowship (2018)
• Fulbright Scholar Fellowship (2010-2011)¹³
• Stanford Humanities Center Fellowships (2011-2012; 2001-2002)
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2001-2002)

• Ross, Janice. The Choreography of Environments: How the Home of Anna and Lawrence Halprin Home Transformed Contemporary Dance and Urban Design. Oxford University Press. 2025. ISBN 9780197775622.⁶
• Manning, Susan; Ross, Janice; Schneider, Rebecca, eds. (2020). Futures of Dance Studies. The University of Wisconsin Press.¹⁴
• Ross, Janice. Like A Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press. 2015. ISBN 9780300207637.¹⁵
• Ross, Janice. Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance. University of California Press. 2007. ISBN 9780520247574.¹⁶
• Ross, Janice. San Francisco Ballet at Seventy-Five (Chronicle, 2007)
• Ross, Janice. Moving Lessons: Margaret H'Doubler and The Beginning of Dance In American Education. University of Wisconsin Press. 2000.¹⁷

• The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (2020)
• The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance (2019)
• Ingber, Judith Brin, ed. (2011). "Jewish Culture and Identity in the Russian Ballet: The Case of Leonid Jacobson". Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance. Wayne State University Press. ISBN 9780814333303.
• Ingber, Judith Brin, ed. (2008). Perspectives on Israeli and Jewish Dance.

• Ross, Janice L. (2022-10-21). "Ballet and the Renegotiation of Identity among Jewish Orthodox Women in Israel". Arts. 11 (5): 107. doi:10.3390/arts11050107. ISSN 2076-0752.
• Ross, Janice L. (2009). "Atomizing Cause and Effect: Ann Halprin's 1960s Summer Dance Workshops". Art Journal. 69 (2): 62–75. doi:10.1080/00043249.2009.10791346.
• Ross, Janice L. (2007-02-06). "Where they danced: patrons, institutions, spaces: Institutional forces and the shaping of dance in the American university". Dance Chronicle. 25: 115–124. doi:10.1081/DNC-120003122.
• Ross, Janice L. (2004-06-01). "Anna Halprin's Urban Rituals". The Drama Review. 48 (2): 49–67. doi:10.1162/105420404323063391.