Danielle Russo, assistant professor of the practice in performing and media arts in the College of Arts and Sciences, was honored in December with a residency at the renowned Yaddo artist’s retreat.
During her Yaddo residency, Russo developed a dance piece based on long-term research, enriching the work by drawing on ideas of ritual movement, personal memories and family history, and more.
“My time at Yaddo yielded a synergy between research ideas,” Russo said. “For many years I’ve been fascinated by gesture – small scale movements with large meaning, the specific and recognizable.”
Her research during the residency influenced the debut performance of her dance piece “Prelude,” which gives a glimpse of her long-term research, in Brooklyn Dec. 17.
Russo arrived at Yaddo, whose alumni include 80 Pulitzer Prize winners and more than 30 MacArthur Fellows, planning to steep herself in legacies of gesture, religious iconography and the symbolic postures of religious devotion.
What was unplanned was a serendipitous connection with another resident, a writer, who was also studying gesture. They discussed the work of art and cultural historian Aby Warburg (whose work is archived in the Cornell University Library). The conversation inspired Russo to examine Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, an attempt to map how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear later in art and culture.
“Several of Warburg’s references were the very same materials I had already been engaging in my choreographic process for this project, taped to my studio walls at Yaddo,” Russo said.
She integrated this Warburg research into the work, which she had begun in June 2025 while doing a residency at Kaatsbaan International Dance Center. She further developed the performance piece during marathon sessions with collaborators at Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts in fall 2025, supported by an award from the New York State Choreographers Initiative from the New York State Council on the Arts and NYS DanceForce.
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