About me

Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA and a 2025-2026 American Council of Learned Societies Fellow. She earned a BA in English at Oklahoma State University, an MFA in Creative Writing at San Diego State University, and an MA and PhD in Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching center community-engaged, decolonizing, and bodily analysis methodologies to examine the politics and practices of dance and other movement modes—such as theater, athletics, rodeo, and yoga—for people in and beyond structures and institutions of confinement.

Professor Blu Wakpa is a mother, scholar, poet, and practitioner of Indigenous dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous Sign Language), martial arts, and yoga. She holds a fifth-degree black belt in her family system of martial arts, two national wrestling championships, and certifications in yoga and massage. Her first book project, Decolonial Choreographies: Native Education, Incarceration, and Performance, historically and politically contextualizes dance, theater, basketball, and yoga at two sites of child confinement on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota: a former Indian boarding school and a tribal juvenile hall. Of Filipina, European, and tribally unenrolled, Native ancestries, she approaches her work as an Indigenous ally. Her writings have been translated into French and Portuguese and appear in academic journals and books. In addition to her research, she is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Critical Yoga Studies journal (formerly Race and Yoga).

In 2023, Professor Blu Wakpa’s article, “From Buffalo Dance to Tatanka Kcizapi Wakpala, 1894–2020: Indigenous Human and More-than-Human Choreographies of Sovereignty and Survival,” won the American Society for Theatre Research’s Gerald Kahan Scholar’s Prize for the best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal or edited collection. That same year, she was named the Fulbright Association’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Dance Lecture Awardee. She has held major fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Program, the Hellman Fellows Fund, and the UC President's Postdoctoral Program. At UCLA, her research has been supported by the Academic Senate, the Anti-Hate Institute, the Bedari Kindness Institute, the Center for the Study of Women, the Institute of American Cultures, the Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and the School of the Arts and Architecture.

Reciprocal and respectful community-engagement is at the heart of Professor Blu Wakpa’s work, and she has collaborated with people, organizations, and institutions at UCLA, in Los Angeles, and throughout the US. At UCLA, she is affiliated with the American Indian Studies Center and the Center for Community Engagement. She has taught a wide range of interdisciplinary, community-engaged, and movement classes at public, private, tribal, and carceral institutions, and has collaborated with California tribal and Lakota communities on exhibitions and performances. For her pedagogical projects bridging the academy and off-campus communities, she has received support from the UC Humanities Research Institute, UCLA’s Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged Scholars and the Center for the Advancement of Teaching, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Radical Teacher Fellowship. In 2023, the mayor’s office appointed her to the Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission for which she currently serves as the Vice Chair. As the mother of two Lakota children (enrolled Cheyenne River Sioux), Professor Blu Wakpa also serves as the Vice Chair for the Los Angeles Unified School District’s American Indian Parent Committee.