Sharon Kivenko is a scholar and performance artist. She got her PhD  in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2016. Sharon’s research and art live at the intersections of performance, embodiment, and social belonging. Her work as an ethnographer, as a professor, and as a dance-artist moves distally from the body to consider the kinds of social encounters that influence and determine individual and communal being-in-the world. The main focus of Sharon’s academic research has been on the performed ways in which professional dancers and musicians from Mali, West Africa garner social recognition in local, national, and transnational arena. Her research is part of a larger set of scholarly efforts in dance studies, social anthropology, and gender studies to highlight the complex relations among arts production, labor, migration, and citizenship; relations that themselves illuminate how paying attention to somatic modes of being in the world reveal nuanced perspectives on race, gender, class and sexuality. 

A member of the Somerville-based arts collective, Excavate, Sharon explores with her collaborators the dusty corners and edges of our social consciousness, asking questions about what it means and what it feels like to navigate and re-form urban environments in these times of ecological, social, economic and political disharmony. 

When not writing, teaching, or performing, Sharon enjoys making collages of repurposed materials with her curious six-year-old daughter and playing the kazoo with her tireless two-year-old son.