Toni Shapiro-Phim | Brandeis University
Arts, social justice, human rights and peacebuilding; dance in diverse historical and cultural contexts; refugee and migration studies; Southeast Asian Studies, with a particular focus on Cambodia; gender concerns; war and genocide; community engagement.
Toni Shapiro-Phim is Assistant Director of the Center’s Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts and Associate Professor of Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST).Dr. Shapiro-Phim is a cultural anthropologist and dance ethnologist whose research, writing, community work and teaching focus on the history and cultural contexts of the arts in discrete regions of the world, particularly in relation to violence, genocide, migration and refugees, conflict transformation and gender concerns.She’s held teaching and research appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, Yale University and Bryn Mawr College, and worked in Cambodian, Lao and Vietnamese refugee camps in Indonesia and Thailand. She’s also conducted years of ethnographic research inside Cambodia. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Cornell University.Dr. Shapiro-Phim has dedicated her professional career to nurturing the arts as part of social justice transformations. Co-author of Dance in Cambodia and co-editor of Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, she has also contributed to Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide and The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement, and Neuroscience, among other publications.Before coming to Brandeis, Dr. Shapiro-Phim served as Director of Programs at the Philadelphia Folklore Project, an arts and social justice organization. There she conducted ethnographic research, curated exhibitions, and produced performances, humanities forums and publications highlighting aspects of the cultural practices of Philadelphia’s diverse communities in the service of countering injustice and nurturing local knowledge and cultural equity.Dr. Shapiro-Phim’s documentary film Because of the War shares the stories of four women: mothers, refugees, immigrants, singers, dancers and survivors of Liberia’s civil wars. The movie highlights ways in which these superstar recording artists harness the potency of their arts to call for an end to violence at home in West Africa and in exile in North America.
Elli Kongas Maranda Prize from the American Folklore Society for outstanding work on women’s traditional, vernacular, and local culture and/or work on feminist theory and folklore, for directing the documentary film, Because of the War (2018)
Scholarship
Shapiro-Phim, Toni, Naomi Jackson and Rebecca Pappas, ed. Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance. 1st ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. (forthcoming)
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Embodying the Pain and Cruelty of Others.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 14. 1 (2020): 209–219.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Imagining Alternatives: Cambodia, Accountability and Compassion.” Coexistence in the Aftermath of Mass Violence. Ed. Laura McGrew and Eve Zucker. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Liberian Women’s Chorus for Change: Artist-Heroes in Our Midst.” UNESCO Art-Lab Talks #4. (2020): <https://en.unesco.org/news/art-lab-talks-4-liberian-womens-chorus-change-artist-heroes-our-midst>.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Turning a Bitter Person Sweet.” Liberian Studies Journal 41. 1 (2019): 46-54.
Because of the War. Director, Producer Shapiro-Phim, Toni. Philadelphia Folklore Project, www.becauseofthewar.org, 2018.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni, Ralph Buck and Nicholas Rowe. Talking Dance: Contemporary Histories from the South China Sea. 1st ed. London: I.B. Tauris, 2016.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Salt Soul: Loss and Mourning, Part 1.” thINKing dance (2016): <http://thinkingdance.net/articles/2016/09/30/3/SaltSoul-Loss-and-Mourning-part-1>.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Salt Soul: Loss and Mourning, Part 2.” thINKing dance (2016): <http://thinkingdance.net/articles/2016/10/02/3/SaltSoul-Loss-and-Mourning-part-2/>.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Review of The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia.” Rev. of The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, by Rachmi Diyah Larasati. Indonesia vol. 98 October 2014: 163-165.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Finding New Futures: Dancing Home.” The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement and Neuroscience. Ed. Michelle LeBaron, Carrie MacLeod and Andrew Floyer. Chicago: American Bar Association, 2013. 197 – 207.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni and Naomi Jackshon, ed. Dance, Human Rights and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion. 1st ed. Latham: Scarecrow Press, 2008.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Cambodia’s Seasons of Migration.” Dance Research Journal Winter 2008. (2008): 56 – 73.
Shapiro-Phim, Toni. “Dance, Music and the Nature of Terror in Democratic Kampuchea.” Annihilating Difference: An Anthropology of Genocide. 1st ed. Ed. Alexander Hinton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 179-193.
