Bio:
Pune Dracker is a writer, maker, mover and activist. After a robust career as a content creator, editor and digital strategist in animal welfare, she earned an MFA in Nonfiction/Poetry from The New School and an MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism from School of Visual Arts. Before embarking on the PhD program, she focused on Fashion Studies and Film Studies in MALS, with research topics ranging from the home-sewn costumes in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Joaquin Phoenix’s dancing in Joker to a live screendance inspired by viral videos of autotuned cat fights. She recently presented original research on 1970s teen idols at the Unravelling Fashion Narratives conference in June 2024.
Pune teaches jazz funk dance at the 92Y Harkness Dance Center, and choreographs and stages numbers for student showcases. A lifelong yogi, she teaches hatha and meditation at Integral Yoga, where she has also taught high school students enrolled in City-As-School. A zombie dancer and performer with the Thriller group in the Village Halloween Parade since 2019, she is passionate about dance and movement as accessible and vital for all. Following the Nietzschean dictum that the task of life is art, her academic and aesthetic practices are inspired by The Situationists, Fluxus, and the beauty of chance.
Selected publications “Fashion and the Fleshy Body (In a White Jumpsuit): David Cassidy as Unsung Nonbinary Style Icon,” ZoneModa Journal, Vol. 13 No. 1 (2023) “Blonde & Dangerous: Two iconic screen queens and their evening dresses subvert the patriarchy,” Fashion Through Film and Media online exhibit “In Every Card, a Little God,” Full Bleed Journal of Maryland Institute College of Art, Summer 2023 “meat, cesspool, cabbage, la pietà,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2023 “Op Ed: A Lament for a Gathering Place,” Oculus magazine, Winter 2022
Research Interests:
- Screendance
- Thriller re-enactments as a way to create community
- The dressed performing body (in particular, the dressed dancing body)
- Halloween costumes
- Scratch-off lottery tickets as performance, spectacle, and alternative moral economic community
- 1970s teen idols
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