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VK Preston is a cultural historian of performance traversing artistic and critical practices (movement, texts, images, cultural expression). Their research includes performing arts and archives, improvisation, and intersectional historiography. VK works alongside artists and scientists in dance studies, health, and research creation, investigating histories of the senses in experiential, often narrative approaches to embodiment and artistic practices. VK’s recent research addresses performance and early modern archives entangled with France, the Atlantic world, Turtle Island (North America), and long histories of French colonization in the Americas. This work is a practice of reckoning with performing arts archives and institutions; it reflects on practices of lived inheritance from movement techniques to material culture, economics, and world-building. They are currently working on their first book manuscript, and they are working on the concept of danceways as analogues to foodways and folkways.
VK is currently interim director of the Honours undergraduate program in History at Concordia and Co-director, with Lilia Mestre and Meghan Moe Beitiks, of LePARC, the Performing Arts Research Cluster at Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.