I study Black modern dance as a form of intellectual and political work. Drawing on methods from intellectual, urban, and cultural history, I treat choreography as an embodied language through which artists debated race, citizenship, and belonging in twentieth-century America. My archive ranges from foundation records and television footage to oral histories and choreographic notes, allowing me to trace how dance circulated ideas far beyond the concert stage.
The Movements of Black Modern Dance: Choreography, Education, and Community Engagement, 1960-1989 expands the story of the post-war “dance boom” by centering African American choreographers as public intellectuals. Five chapters move from magazine debates over the phrase “Black dance” to community performances on Harlem’s Dancemobile, Rod Rodgers’s lecture-demonstrations for schoolchildren, Alvin Ailey’s televised collaborations with Duke Ellington, and the advent of Black dance on Broadway . Across these sites, I show how artists built an institutional infrastructure—funding networks, magazines, touring circuits—that democratized access to their art and advanced national conversations about race and cultural citizenship.
“‘Sport Becoming an Art’,” Journal of African American History (in press, 2025).
“Dance Across Departments,” Dance Chronicle special issue on pedagogy (in press, 2025).
“Civic Education and Artistic Innovation on NYC’s Dancemobile, 1967-1988,” Journal of Urban History 51:3 (2023).
“The Choreographer as Intellectual: Alvin Ailey’s Ideas about Black Modern Dance,” Journal of American Culture 44:3 (2021).
My work has been funded by the Library of Congress (Kluge Fellowship 2025-26), the Smithsonian Institution, Emory University, and the Rockefeller Archive Center, among others.
I pair close choreographic analysis with material from city archives, philanthropic files, and oral-history interviews to show how bodily practice intersects with urban space and public policy. In public talks for venues such as the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the National Museum of American History, I translate these findings for wider audiences and invite collaboration with scholars across disciplines.