Annelies Van Assche obtained a joint doctoral degree in Art Studies and Social Sciences in 2018 at Ghent University and KU Leuven. In her FWO-funded research on Dancing Precarity, she studied the working and living conditions of contemporary dance artists in Brussels and Berlin. She was production manager at contemporary dance school P.A.R.T.S. from 2011 until 2014. Since 2014, she has been connected with research groups S:PAM (Ghent University) and CeSO (KU Leuven). In 2019, she started a postdoctoral research on labor and aesthetics in contemporary dance in Europe’s (Eastern) periphery at Ghent University.
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 her work has been published in journals as Performance Research, Research in Dance Education and Dance Research. She has a book publication entitled Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance. Dancing Precarity (Palgrave MacMillan, 2020). 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).
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.
Function: Research in the Arts