About
Jennifer Dawson Allgaier attended UC Irvine and earned two Bachelor's degrees, one
in dance and one in French literature. At UC Irvine, she participated in numerous
faculty dance concerts and worked with such choreographers as David Allan, Donald
McKayle, Alonso King, Nancy Lee Ruyter, James Penrod, and El Gabriel.
In 1998, Dr. Allgaier completed a Master’s of Fine Arts degree in dance, also at UC
Irvine, and began working on a Ph.D. in dance history and theory at UC Riverside.
She completed this latter degree in January of 2006. Dr. Allgaier’s research examines
the organization of ballet at the Paris Opéra during the middle decades of the nineteenth
century. It foregrounds the conditions in which female dancers worked, all the while
keeping the labor trends and ideologies of ballet and the French social order at play.
Dr. Allgaier was awarded a Humanities Research Grant as well as a Dissertation Research
Grant, both from the Graduate Division of UC Riverside, to fund the archival research
necessary to this project.
Dr. Allgaier has worked as a dance educator, both in private studios and higher education,
since 1996. She has taught various levels of ballet, jazz, modern dance, composition,
dance concert production, and dance history at UC Irvine, UC Riverside, Scripps, Citrus
College, Mt. San Antonio College, Norco College, and Riverside Ballet Arts. She joined
the dance faculty at Santa Ana College in the Fall of 2005, leaving in the Spring
of 2007 to start a family. She returned to the SAC Dance Department in the Fall of
2019.
