Tria Blu Wakpa
Tria Blu Wakpa
Core Faculty
Assistant Professor
World Arts and Cultures/Dance | Native American education and incarceration; indigenous contemporary dance and performance; Native American athletics; indigenous martial arts; North American Hand Talk (Indigenous Sign Language); Native American literature and theory; Native and African American relations; race and yoga; and creative writing
Office: Kaufman Hall 140C
Email: triabluwakpa@g.ucla.edu
Phone: +1 (310) 206-1336
Biography
Tria Blu Wakpa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She received a Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley; an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Diego State University; and a B.A. in English with an option in Film summa cum laude from Oklahoma State University. Her research and teaching center community-engaged, decolonizing, and movement analysis methodologies to examine the politics of dance and other holistic practices—such as theater, athletics, and yoga—for Indigenous peoples in and beyond structures and institutions of confinement. She is a mother, scholar, poet, and practitioner of Indigenous dance, Indigenous Hand Talk (sign language), martial arts, and yoga. In addition, she is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief for Race and Yoga, the first peer-reviewed and open-access journal in the emerging field of critical yoga studies.
Her first book project, Choreographies in Confinement: The Politics of Native Education, Incarceration, and Performance, contextualizes dance, theatrical productions, basketball, and/or yoga at two sites for Native children on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota: a former Indian boarding school and a tribal juvenile hall. Her writings have been translated into French and Portuguese and appeared in academic journals and books, including: The American Indian Culture and Research Journal, American Quarterly, Critical Stages/Scènes, Dance Research Journal, The International Journal of Screendance, Performance Matters, Scholar and Feminist Online, Urdimento, Carceral Liberalism: Feminist Voices Against State Violence, Dance in US Popular Culture, Indigenous Motherhood in the Academy, Milestones in Dance History, and Practicing Yoga as Resistance: Voices of Color in Search of Freedom.
In 2023, Professor Blu Wakpa’s article, “From Buffalo Dance to Tatanka Kcizapi Wakpala, 1894-2020: Indigenous Human and More-than-Human Choreographies of Sovereignty and Survival,” won the American Society for Theatre Research’s Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize “for the best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal or edited collection.” This same year, she was named the Fulbright Association’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Dance Lecture Awardee. She has held major fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Program. At UCLA, several entities have supported her research: the Academic Senate, the Center for the Study of Women, the Institute of American Cultures, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and the School of the Arts and Architecture.
Professor Blu Wakpa’s work bridges the academy and off campus communities. At UCLA, she is affiliated with the American Indian Studies Center and the Center for Community Engagement and serves as the Community Engagement Council representative for the Institute of American Cultures. She has taught a wide range of interdisciplinary and community-engaged classes at public, private, tribal, and carceral institutions and partnered with California tribal and Lakota experts on exhibitions and performances. For these projects, she has received support from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, UCLA’s Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars and Center for Advancement of Teaching, and the University of Pittsburg’s Radical Teacher Fellowship. In 2023, the mayor appointed her to the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission. She also currently serves on the American Indian Parent Committee for the Los Angeles Unified School District and the Parent Advisory Committee for the Fernandeño Tataviam Band of Mission Indians’ Education and Cultural Learning Department.
