Dancing from the Heart is the first study of gender, globalization, and expressive culture in the Cook Islands. It demonstrates how dance in particular plays a key role in articulating the overlapping local, regional, and transnational agendas of Cook Islanders. Kalissa Alexeyeff reconfigures conventional views of globalization's impact on indigenous communities, moving beyond diagnoses of cultural erosion and contamination to a grounded exploration of creative agency and vital cultural production. Central to the study is a rich and textured ethnographic account of contemporary Cook Islands dance practice. Based on fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and archival research, it offers an engrossing analysis of how Cook Islands social life is generated through expressive practices. Dance is explored in a variety of settings, including beauty pageants, tourist venues, nightclubs, and community celebrations at home and within Cook Islands communities abroad. Contemporary Cook Islands dance practices are also shaped by competing ideas about the past. Debates about precolonial traditions, missionization, and colonialism pervade discussions about dance and expressive culture. Alexeyeff shows how the politics of tradition reflect the competing moral, political, personal, and economic practices of postcolonial Cook Islanders. Throughout the work the stories and voices of individuals are brought to the fore. Their views are juxtaposed with scholarship on tradition, modernity, and social dynamics.

Kalissa Alexeyeff has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University, a Masters in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, Monash University and a PhD in Anthropology, The Australian National University. She has written a book Dancing from the Heart: Movement, Gender and Cook Islands Globalization (Univeristy of Hawai'i Press, 2009) which is based on 2 years fieldwork in the Cook Islands and New Zealand. It explores the significance of dance in the Cook Islands throughout colonial history and in its contemporary manifestations.

Her research interests include expressive culture in particular dance and music in the Cook Islands and the Asia-Pacific region more generally, gender politics cross-culturally, development, migration and globalisation.