Anna Jayne Kimmel is a performance studies scholar invested in the intersection of legal humanities and dance studies, with particular attention to race/coloniality and bodily scrutiny as grounded through francophone histories. This focus extends across historical and contemporary themes of policing, capture, and detainment and motivates scholarship in First Amendment rights, broadly reimagined.

Her current book manuscripts, Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law and Empire (Stanford University Press, forthcoming) and Performing Law (co-edited with Peter Goodrich and Bernadette Meyler, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), exemplify the performative, kinesthetic, and fleshly undercurrents of law. Her second monograph project extends this epistemological shift toward legal figurations of bodily autonomy across deathscapes and the right to die movement.

Additional scholarship appears in Dance Research Journal, Performance Research, Lateral, The Drama Review (TDR), and The Brooklyn Rail, as well as various edited volumes. She serves on the board of Performance Studies international and is an Associate Editor for Performance Research. Kimmel holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Stanford University and an A.B. from Princeton University. 

As a dancer, she has performed the works of Ohad Naharin, Trisha Brown, John Jasperse, Francesca Harper, Olivier Tarpaga, and Susan Marshall, amongst others. In addition, Kimmel pursues community-engaged research in carceral studies, fostering collaboration with artists in confinement and serving as a restorative justice facilitator for alternative accountability programs in the DMV area.