Olive Demar
Writing
“Location, Contradiction, Ambivalence: Feminist Methodologies Within and Beyond the University” in Intersectional Feminist Research Methodologies, edited by Jennifer Cooke and Line Nyhagen (London: Routledge, 2024).
“Shit, Cum, and Milk: On Relating to Institutions of Higher Education,” Blind Field: A Journal of Cultural Inquiry, March 2024.
“Notes from an Inquiry into Contingent Work,” SubStance 53, no. 1 (2024).
“More than Meets the Eye: Towards Critical Institutional Research in Dance Studies,” Dance Chronicle 45, no. 1 (2022).
“Florence Treadwell Boynton in Progressive Era Berkeley: Early Modern Dance and California’s Political Unconscious,” Dance Chronicle 43, no. 3 (2020).
“Learning from Experience: Disciplinary Hybridity between Group Psychoanalysis and Performance,” Performance Research 25, no. 4 (2020).
“Rethinking Halprin’s Parades and Changes: Postmodern Dance, Racialized Urban Restructuring, and Mid-1960s San Francisco,” TDR: the Drama Review 64, no. 2 (2020).
“Dance, Real Estate, and Institutional Critique: Reconsidering Glorya Kaufman’s Dance Philanthropy in Los Angeles,” Lateral 7, no. 2 (2018).
“The Wallflower Order and Social Reproduction: Gender, Work, and Feminist Dance,” TDR: the Drama Review 62, no. 1 (2018).
Collaborative Writing
“Reckoning with the Alma Mater,” Spectre Journal, December 2025, co-authored with Eli Meyerhoff.
“Marxist Keywords for Performance,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 36, no. 1 (2021), co-authored with Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, Shane Boyle, Ash Dilks, Caoimhe Mader McGuinness, Lisa Moravec, Alessandro Simari, Clio Unger, and Martin Young.
“Pseudo-, anti-, and total dance: A self-interview on curation,” co-authored with the SALTA Collective, Curating Live Arts: Global Perspectives, Envisioning Theory and Practice in Performance, edited by Davida, Pronovost, Hudon, and Gabriels (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018).
Book Reviews
Review of Manuel R. Cuellar's Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation, Pacific Historical Review 93, no. 1 (2024).
Review of Malcolm Harris's Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World and Jenny Odell's Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis 2, no. 3 (2023).
Review of Annelies Van Assche's Labor and Aesthetics in European Contemporary Dance, Dance Research Journal 53, no. 3 (2021).
“The Searing and Fleeting Improvisational World of Grand Union,” a review of Wendy Perron’s The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976, Dance Chronicle 42, no. 2 (2021).
“Opening all of the Windows: a review of The Routledge Companion to Art and Politics,” Socialism and Democracy Journal 20, no. 1 (2016).
About
Olive Demar is a writer, editor, and investigator. Previously, she was the editor in chief of a peer-reviewed journal. Her interests: California, history from below, social movements, the manifest & the latent, place, buildings, groups, transformative justice, the here & now, noir. She is currently collaborating on a volume, Alma Mater: Defamiliarizing Higher Education, with Eli Meyerhoff. She works as a private investigator in the San Francisco bay area.
PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
Member: California Association of Licensed Investigators
Contact: demar.olive@gmail.com
