Osburn has been a social dancer of the Argentine tango since 2008, is involved in the performance and instruction of the dance, and is versed in its music, history, and literature. He aims to expand awareness of tango as a cultural form that is meaningful to its practitioners and applicable to a range of social and professional situations.
He can be seen regularly at Milonga Falucho in New York reciting his translations of tango lyrics, which he blogs on What Tango Means. The project was shared on the Tango Café podcast #23: listen at 0:19:00. During the COVID-19 shutdown, his translations were a feature of La Pandemia, a virtual milonga.
The Philadephia Tango School’s online lecture series presented his talk “Lights, Camera, Tango!,” on tango in the movies, in fall 2020.
In summer 2018, he taught Theater in Latin America: The Drama and Theatricality of Tango at NYU, looking at the social and theatrical performance of tango from its origins to the present. Also that year, he did voice-over and subtitle translations for Social Tango at Centro Cultural 25 de Mayo, a production of the Social Tango Project in the Buenos Aires Tango Festival, and was Artist-in-Residence with Tangolandó at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. More recently, he provided Spanish-to-English translation of the narration to Souls of Tango by Analia Carrreño and Luis Ramirez, which premiered in late 2021.
Seeing tango as a microcosm of human experience, he conceived of Tango and Communication, a workshop co-facilitated with Laura Real in the engineering school at the Cooper Union. Participants experienced the dance as a template for leadership, communication, teamwork, networking, cultural exchange, and gender relations. It built on a partnership with Real, his longtime teacher, in several performance/demonstrations, including NeuroTango: Brainwaves in Sync?, for Brain Awareness Week, a program of the Greater NYC Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience: watch.
Osburn wrote an introduction to the Social Tango Project photo exhibition in 2013 and has reviewed numerous tango-related events on osburnt.com. He is interviewed in the documentary MigranTango, which explores the cross-cultural currents of tango in New York City. At Anthony Forest Hills, he curated the live music and social dancing for Tango Night (2013) and Tango in Fashion (2015).
He assisted Laura Real in classes for Gourmetango and was assistant organizer for its MeetUp.com groups. In 2014, Dancing at Sea engaged him as a Host Dancer on an Argentine tango cruise. He has experienced tango in Buenos Aires, Madrid, Medellín, and several North American cities in addition to New York, and studied with a variety of well-known instructors.