Rebekah’s U.S.-based research investigates how individual and collective bodies are entangled with/in global power relations. Her work draws on sources and methods in critical dance, cultural, and performance studies in dialogue with scholarly inquiry in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Increasingly she queries the significance of dance and choreographic practices occurring outside of traditional theatrical settings including in museums, festivals, parades, and, most recently, in places and archives no one thinks to look for dance.

She comes to UCLA from The University of Iowa, where she taught courses in dance history and theory and served as Chair of the Department of Dance, Collegiate Scholar, and as a faculty fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office.

Kowal has published widely in dance and performance studies, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and The University of Iowa. Her book-length projects include How To Do Things with Dance: Performing Change in Postwar America (Wesleyan U.P. 2010), winner of the 2012 Outstanding Publication Award from the Congress of Research on Dance (CORD); Dancing the World Smaller: Staging Globalism in Mid-Century America (Oxford U.P. 2020), finalist for the 2021 Outstanding Book Award by the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and shortlisted for the 2023 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research by the Dance Studies Association (DSA), and The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2017), co-edited with Gerald Siegmund and Randy Martin, which received an honorable mention for the 2018 Sally Banes Biennial Publication Prize by the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR).

In the professional field, she serves as Executive Co-Editor of Dance Research Journal, or DRJ, and Vice Chair of the DRJ Editorial Board, and formerly on the Boards of Directors of the National Association of Schools of Dance (NASD), the Dance Studies Association (DSA), and the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS). She is a coach for the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD).

Kowal holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University in American Studies, a Certificate of Movement Analysis (C.M.A.) from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City, and a B.A. from Barnard College/Columbia University with Honors in English and a minor in Dance.