Robyn Doty is a writer, activist, and co-founder/co-runner of Whistle While You Work. For Whistle she wrote and published the Whistle ‘Zine that provides international resources for dancers and explains sexual harassment, discrimination, and abuse of power in dance. She also wrote and published a hand-out for dancers with guidelines for reporting abuse and what to say to shut discrimination down. She manages the volunteers and translations for the resources, and facilitates workshops for Whistle. With Frances Chiaverini she responds to dancer incidents, finds support for dancers in their local communities, researches international news regarding gender parity and adds them to the growing resources list on Whistle’s website, attends and presents at international dancers’ rights conferences and meetings, and structures the workshops.
In 2019 she graduated with an M.A. from the Goethe University Frankfurt where she studied and was active in Memory Studies and Transcultural Studies. In 2017 she co-organized a weeklong postcolonial studies Summer School about performance at the Goethe University Frankfurt. Since 2016 she has collaborated as a writer and dramaturg with BOHL (Frances Chiaverini and Katja Cheraneva); as a writer and dramaturg for Roderick George’s kNoname dance company’s DUST, FLESHLESS BEAST (Berlin); and with Katja Cheraneva on Cards Against Contemporary Dance. She has shown her own work at the Goethe University and has had her poetry and photography published by Belleville Park Pages. She is the project manager and dramaturg for Whistle’s upcoming work, It’s my house and I live here., and is Chiaverini’s collaborator during their NYU CBA Fellowship in 2020.