Ninotchka Bennahumis Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her areas of teaching and research include dance history, art history, performance theory, and feminist historiographies of flamenco, ballet, and contemporary performance. 

Bennahum grew up in New Mexico watching the flamenco performances of María Benitez and Eva Encinas-Sandoval, training in ballet and music. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University where she studied with Brooks McNamara, Joe Roach, Cynthia Novack, Richard Schechner, Mick Taussig, Peggy Phelan, Lynn Garafola, Deborah Jowitt, and Marcia. B. Siegel. She holds a B.A. in History and Art History from Swarthmore College where she studied with Robert DuPlessis, Marjorie Murphy, Sharon Friedler, Lillian Li, and T. Kaori Kitao.

While in graduate school, she became a stringer for The Village Voice under Elizabeth Zimmer, and a contributing editor of Dance Magazinewhere she was assigned flamenco performances in tablaosand small theaters throughout New York City and Spain. What emerged was a growing body of Roma, Spanish, and American female flamenco artists – a post-Francoist feminist historiography. She is the author of two books on the subject: Antonia Mercé, ‘La Argentina: Flamenco & the Spanish Avant-Garde(2000), a bio-history of Antonia Mercé and the intersectionality of Leftism and Spanish dance modernism, andCarmen, a Gypsy Geography (2013), a feminist, transhistorical study of the Gitanain Ancient Middle Eastern and Spanish history. 

With time, she branched into other subject areas, co-authoring four books on dance, embodiment, and flamencology, the first with her mother, the distinguished dance scholar, Judith Chazin-Bennahum, entitled The Living Dance: A Global Anthology of Essays on Movement & Culture (2012); the second, an exhibition and published volume Transformation & Continuance:Jennifer Muller & the Re-Shaping of American Modern Dance, 1959 – Present (2011); the third, a co-curated exhibition and published book with K. Meira Goldberg, 100 Years of Flamenco on the New York Stage (2013), and the fourth, a transatlantic volume of feminist flamenco scholarship, the result of an SDHS/CORD conference in New Mexico: Flamenco on the Global Stage: Theoretical, Historical and Critical Perspectives (2015), co-edited with Michelle Heffner-Hayes and K. Meira Goldberg. 

Seeking a more fluid, interdisciplinary approach to performance art and dance scholarship, she collaborated with the American art and architectural historian, Bruce Robertson, Director of the Art, Design, & Architecture Museum at UCSB, and preeminent Judson scholar, critic, and Trisha Brown dance artist, Wendy Perron. The result, Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955 – 1972 (2017), a bi-coastal exhibition, curated volume and performance series, considered the historical and artistic significance of Anna Halprin in seeding postmodern dance. Halprin’s turn to Talmudic ethics and a bio-anatomical approach to the body as a natural environment democratized how, where, when, and by what means we dance. Bennahum was invited to install a smaller iteration of Radical Bodies focused solely on Anna Halprin and her radical Civil Rights era pedagogy. This is a permanent installation in the Dance Department at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, opening 2019. In 2021, she will again co-curate an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center on California/New York Dance Modernism and the late 19^thcentury birth of contemporary performance along the Central Coast. 

From 1996 to 2012, Bennahum designed and taught a global dance history curriculum for American Ballet Theatre’s 7 summer intensive programs located throughout the U.S. She also taught dance and performance theory to ABT and ABT II. Currently, she is writing a history of the company, examining the relationship between war, citizenship, and ballet.