Melissa Melpignano is an interdisciplinary dance scholar and practitioner. She works as an Assistant Professor and Director of Dance in the Department of Theatre & Dance at UTEP. Her research focuses on how dance, choreography, and performance support our inquiry into urgent regional and planetary questions about the persistence and emergence of conflict; health access and disparity; environmental awareness and water conservation and distribution. Her projects question the stakes of dancing, choreographing, and performing in contested and border areas, such as the Mexico-U.S. border, Palestine-Israel, and the Mediterranean region, through the original framework of "livability" while interrogating how we define humanity.With an international background in performance, dance, and literary studies, she received her Ph.D. in Culture & Performance from UCLA. She is a recipient of several awards, including, more recently, the Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics from the American Society for Aesthetics. Most recent grants include a National Endowment of the Arts Research Grant for the project "Somatics and Movement for Healthcare," Humanities Texas and Texas Commission on the Arts grants, and a Wechter Excellence Fund award. She served on the Board of the Dance Studies Association, where she currently is a member of the Steering Committee on Awards. At UTEP, she completed her term as UTEP Edge Fellow (2022-2024) and now serves as a UTEP Edge Curriculum Fellow. She is a certified somatic educator in the Franklin Method®, a trained facilitator in Theatre for Healthcare Equity, and a trainee of conflict engagement expert and performance artist Dana Caspersen.She has a forthcoming book for an Italian academic press in her capacity as a critical ballet scholar, Immemorial Presences: Variations and Reverberations in Ballet Librettos, which looks at marginalized 18th and 19th c. ballet documents and ballet bodies to debunk hegemonic conceptualizations of sexuality and revalue the strict and mutual relation between writing and choreographing, while highlighting the social prominence of ballet in pre-Unity Italian politics.Her next book project, Undoing Ambiguity: Choreographic Theorizations in Palestine-Israel, looks at how choreographic practices in Palestine-Israel tackle the ambiguous development of discourses around colonialism, conflict, and violence. She is also working on another book project, Choreocracy: Dance Organizing and the Batsheva Dance Company, a history of the prominent Israeli dance company from the perspective of the bureaucratization of the dance system in Israel since its establishment.Her essays appear in the Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, 50 Contemporary Choreographers, 3rd edition (Routledge), TDR The Drama Review, Dance Research Journal, The Dancer Citizen, Contemporary Choreography, 3rd edition (forthcoming), among others.As a dance maker, dramaturg, facilitator, and performer with a background in various Western and Mediterranean theatrical, traditional, and experimental dance and somatic forms, Melpignano has worked internationally for two decades. She is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary, artist-led collective Somos Agua / We Are Water, whose mission is to tackle issues of water scarcity and unequal access to water in the Paso del Norte Region. In this context and as a member of the interdisciplinary UTEP One Water Cluster, she is a co-organizer of the annual UTEP World Water Week conference. Her community-engaged, site-specific performances Mapping the Rio (2023) and Swamp Lake (2024) have gathered hundreds of audience members and fostered collaborations with local environmental organizations, stewards, and experts in the Paso del Norte region. For her performance project #documance, she has collaborated with a variety of visual artists, such as Sam Reveles and Angel Cabrales. With Cabrales, she choreographs and performs in the expansive project The Uncolonized/Teoquiyaoatl at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque (NM).As a committed project leader and facilitator of performing arts practices for the advancement of access to healthcare and the expansion of wellbeing through embodied education, she is the Principal Investigator of "Somatics and Movement for Healthcare," with Dr. Amelia Rau as Co-PI., a NEA-funded project in partnership with Texas Tech University Health Science Center’s (TTUHSC), UTEP Health Sciences, and numerous hospitals, clinics, and healthcare professionals in El Paso.Dr. Melpignano is also a passionate translation. She is working on the translation of Georgina Escobar's play Stoneheart and of Gris Muñoz's poetry collection Coatlique Girl (both from Spanish and English into Italian), and she has translated (from Italian to English) the poetry collection Syriana by Leonardo Tonini.