Dr. Halifu Osumare

Dr. Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita African American & African Studies at University of California, Davis, and has been a dancer, choreographer, and cultural activist for over forty years. She is recognized for her global hip hop studies books, elucidating why hip-hop culture became a global youth phenomenon---The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (2007) and The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop (2012), both published by Palgrave Macmillan. As a dancer, she was a soloist with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company of New York in the early 70s, and is a Certified Dunham Technique Instructor. As community activist, she was the founder of CitiCentre Dance Theater in Oakland and created the national dance initiative Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century, for experimental black choreographers in the late 80s and early 90s. Dr. Osumare recently published her autobiography Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir (2018, University Press of Florida) that won the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics and the American Book Award. Dr. Osumare also won the Dance Studies Association 2020 Distinction in Dance Award for lifetime achievement in performance, scholarship and service to dance. Like her mentor Katherine Dunham, she has dedicated her life to the intersections of the arts and humanities for a better world.