NEH grant to support digital archive of Black choreographers' work Professor Mason has been working for a number of years to archive the work of Black choreographers. AUSTIN, TX .- In December, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded just under $100,000 for a project spearheaded by University of Texas at Austin Associate Professor of Dance Gesel Mason to support her ongoing project to archive the work of Black choreographers. Mason and co-project director Rebecca Salzer, associate professor of dance and director of the Collaborative Arts Research Initiative at the University of Alabama, received an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for their project Prototyping an Extensible Framework for Access to Dance Knowledge.