Lynn Theresa Garafola (born December 12, 1946) is an American dance historian, linguist, critic, curator, lecturer, and educator.

[3] Upon graduation from high school in 1964, Garafola found her first summer job, as a salesgirl at Arnold Constable's flagship store in New York, the "Palace of Trade" on Broadway at West 19th Street.

[4] The recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, Lynn spent the following year in Quito, Ecuador, studying Latin American literature and teaching English.

She soon switched her field from Spanish to comparative literature, which she found more intellectually stimulating, and began regular attendance at dance performances in the city.

[5] While still a graduate student, Garafola began her academic career in February 1975 as a part-time lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College, a job she held until June 1977.

She has also directed numerous projects on nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics in ballet as well as in modern, contemporary, African-American, social, and national dance forms.

[6] She has a deep commitment to guiding and developing dance history scholars in work that is empirically rich and that opens new windows onto the past.

In her readings in comparative literature, she chanced across an account of the meeting of Marcel Proust and James Joyce at a 1922 cast party for the Ballets Russes.

Its description of impresario Sergei Diaghilev captured her attention, and she began to think about writing her doctoral dissertation on the influence of the Ballets Russes on intellectuals and writers of imaginative literature.

Her current project focuses on the life and work of choreographer Bronislava Nijinska, younger sister of Vaslav Nijinsky and member of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

All of Garafola's writings have been motivated by her belief in the centrality of dance and its importance to scholarship and the cultural life of a city, a nation, and communities throughout the world.

A former dancer with the Norwegian National Ballet in Oslo, she received a Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in 2020 and is currently employed at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.