Valerie H. Barske is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin (UW), Stevens Point. She gained her PhD from the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also took several courses in the anthropology of human movement. She has been conducting ethnographic research on Okinawan action sign systems since her first Fulbright IIE Fellowship to the University of the Ryukyus in 1998. To enhance her fieldwork skills, in 2004 Dr. Barske also learned Lahu Na Sheleh dances in Chiangmai, Thailand, as a research assistant to Jacquetta Hill and David Plath. With a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Fellowship in 2005-6, Dr. Barske studied the intersections of dancing and peace activism as central to understanding the complex colonial history of Okinawa. Her work has been presented at international conferences such as Interrogating Trauma: Arts and Media Responses to Collective Suffering in Perth, Australia (2008), as well as national venues such as the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, and the American Historical Association. For the school year 2013-14, Barske received a fellowship at the UW Institute for Research in the Humanities for a book project tentatively titled "Crashing Waves of Peace: Trauma, Embodiment, and Decolonizing Okinawa." Dr. Barske considers herself an impassioned "scholar–teacher;" her most recent research in the scholarship of teaching and learning seeks innovative ways of linking feminist pedagogies with effective embodied learning strategies for general education courses.

Kate Grim-Feinberg earned her PhD in 2013 from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently a lecturer and academic adviser for global studies at that university. Her dissertation research examines human movement and children's learning in the Peruvian Andes. Dr. Grim-Feinberg trained at professional ballet schools throughout the United States before studying anthropology, and she has more recently used her dancing skills and knowledge of Labanotation to learn and notate Lahu Na Sheleh dances (northern Thailand). As a member of the research team led by Dr. Jacquetta Hill, she coauthored two papers on this subject that appeared in JASHM 20(2), Fall 2014. She also co-organized a panel "Knowledge in Moving Bodies" for the 2014 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association.

Monica FA W Santos is a Filipino PhD student specializing in the anthropology of human movement in the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her dissertation research is a study of classical ballet, colonialism, and nationalism in her home country, the Philippines. Ms. Santos was awarded a 2014–15 graduate fellowship at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois. Recent publications include "The Tagalog Body" (JASHM 22(1), Spring 2015) and two coauthored papers on Lahu Na Sheleh dances, as a member of the research team led by Dr. Jacquetta Hill (see JASHM 20(2), Fall 2014). With Kate Grim-Feinberg, Ms. Santos co-organized a panel, "Knowledge in Moving Bodies," for the 2014 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Washington D.C. In the Philippines, she is involved in projects promoting different performing arts forms in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. She has also trained in various performing arts traditions, including ballet dancing and kulintang music (traditional music from the southern Philippines). At UIUC, she has performed regularly with the Community (Balinese) Gamelan ensemble as a musician and dancer.