ABOUT

Black Popular Culture Scholar, Dance Educator, Choreographer
PH.D. Scholar/artist

Dr. Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita in the Department of African American and African Studies (AAS) at University of California, Davis, and was the Director of AAS 2011-2014. She has been a dancer, choreographer, arts administrator, and scholar of black popular culture for over fifty years. With a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and an MA in Dance Ethnology from S.F. State University, she is also a protégé of the late renowned dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham and a Certified Instructor of Dunham Dance Technique.

As an artist-scholar, Dr. Osumare has performed, taught, and conducted research not only in the U.S., but also in the African countries of Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya, and recently in Brazil. Her dancing, teaching and writing spans the traditional African to the contemporary African American. She has been recognized as one of the foremost scholars of global hip-hop, publishing The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves in 2007 and, and The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop in 2012, resulting from her 2008 Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Ghana, Legon. She has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on hip-hop, dance, black choreographers, and Katherine Dunham.

Dr. Osumare published her autobiography Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir in 2018 that won the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics and the American Book Award. She also won the Dance Studies Association 2020 Distinction in Dance Award for lifetime achievement in performance, scholarship and service to dance, recognizing her contribution in dance in many arenas. 

As a dancer in the 1970s, she was a soloist with the Rod Rodgers Dance of New York City, and is noted particularly as a Choreographer/Director of theater works by poet and playwright Ntozake Shange. After working with Ms. Shange in her pre-For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf tenure in the Bay Area, she later directed Shange’s For Colored Girls, and choreographed her From Okra to Greens—A Different Kinda Love Story, Spell # 7, and Boogie Woogie Landscape for university theater departments and community theater groups. She has also choreographed for San Francisco’s American Conservative Theater, including Miss Ever’s Boys in 1988, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in 1989, and Pecong in 1993 for which she won the Bay Area Drama Critics Circle Award for choreography.

As an arts administrator, Dr. Osumare founded Everybody’s Creative Arts Center in Oakland in 1977, and over the next ten years saw its transition into CitiCentre Dance Theatre (CDT), becoming one of the anchor tenet’s in Oakland’s Alice Arts Center, now the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts. She not only became a member of CDT professional dance company, but also helped establish California’s multicultural arts movement. She has been a panelist for the California Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts, The Pew Center for the Arts, and Haas Creative Fund. Between 1989-1995 she was the Founder and Executive Producer of her national dance initiative Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century.

Since retiring in 2016 from UC Davis, Dr. Osumare has returned to dance theater, choreographing the acclaimed work, “In The Eye of the Storm.” Subsequently, Sacramento State University dancers came together to realize her vision of the current 21st century social, political, and spiritual crisis, evidenced in the new civil rights movement “Black Lives Matter,” producing her 2019 choreography “Resistance/Resilience.” Like her mentor Katherine Dunham, she has dedicated her life to the intersections of the arts and humanities for a better world.


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