As a writer, editor, and teacher, Selma Cohen (1920-2005) was a leader in transforming dance history, aesthetics, and criticism into respected disciplines. She was born in Chicago and studied ballet while attending the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, receiving her B.A. in 1941 and her Ph.D. in English literature in 1946. Cohen taught English for two years at UCLA, where she realized her true calling was dance. She then taught and choreographed for many years before moving to New York in 1953.
There, she taught at Hunter College and the High School of the Performing Arts and began writing about dance. Cohen wrote the 1950 article, Some Theories of Dance in Contemporary Society as well as early dance criticisms for the New York Times. In 1962, she began a decade of teaching dance history and writing at the American Dance Festival, held at Connecticut College. This resulted in the 1970 formation of a program created to train professional dance critics, many of them journalists without any particular knowledge of the field assigned to cover dance.
Cohen founded Dance Perspectives, a quarterly journal, in 1959 and became the sole editor from 1966-76. She also established the Dance Perspectives Foundation. This led her to undertake her great dream, a multivolume encyclopedia that would provide a concise and accurate source of information on all aspects of dance as an art around the world. The International Encyclopedia of Dance (sponsored by the Dance Perspectives Foundation) was then published. Cohen continued teaching at University of California at Riverside, University of Chicago, Sarah Lawrence, and Smith College. In addition to her many reviews and articles, she published four books: The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief, Doris Humphrey: An Artist First, Dance as a Theatre Art, and Next Week Swan Lake
In 1974, she received a Professional Achievement Award from the University of Chicago, and in 1981, the first Dance Magazine Award given to a dance historian.
