BOOK EDITORS
Stephanie Y. Evans, PhD
Dr. Evans is a Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. She is the author of four books, including Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History (2007) and Black Women’s Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace (2021). She is also co-editor of five books, including Black Women and Mental Health: Balancing Strength and Vulnerability (2017) and Black Women in Public Health: Strategies to Name, Locate, and Change Systems of Power (2022). She was raised on jazz music and lettered in dance in high school, which grounds her focus on Black women’s wellness and embodied Black Studies.
Saroya Corbett, MFA, PhD
Dr. Corbett is a certified teacher in Dunham Technique and the chair of History and Theory for the Institute for Dunham Technique Certification. She is also a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at Williams College and a M'Singha Wuti licensed teacher of Umfundalai. Saroya received her PhD from UCLA in Cultures and Performance, her MFA degree in Dance from Temple University and her BA from Spelman College in economics. In 2014, her chapter “Katherine Dunham’s Mark on Jazz” was published in Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches, which focuses on Katherine Dunham’s contribution to the evolution of jazz dance.
Joanna Dee Das, PhD
Dr. Das is an Associate Professor of Dance at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests include dance in the African diaspora, musical theater dance, and the politics of performance in the twentieth century. She is the author of Katherine Dunham: Dance and the African Diaspora, which won the 2018 de la Torre Bueno Best First Book Award from the Dance Studies Association and a 2019 honorable mention Errol Hill Award for outstanding scholarship in African American theatre and performance from the American Society for Theatre Research. Dr. Das is a Certified Instructor of Dunham Technique and is passionate about teaching the history, theory, and practice of dance from a globally-informed perspective.
FOREWORD CO-WRITTEN BY: Albirda Rose, PhD
Known as Dr. Rose on the campus of San Francisco State University for 36 years, she began teaching Dunham Technique as an undergraduate student in 1970 at Hayward State University. Dr. Albirda Rose received her Doctorate in Education in 1982 from the University of San Francisco; her MA from Mills College in Dance in 1973, where she received a full fellowship to teach Haitian Dance/Dunham Technique; and her BS in Physical education (Dance Emphasis) and Minor Drama from Hayward State University (East Bay). Dr. Rose also graduated from the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley with a Masters in Divinity. In 1986, she traveled with Miss Dunham to Brazil visiting six cities, and became the coordinator for the Annual Dunham Technique Seminar. In 1990 she published Dunham Technique a Way of Life. In 1993 the first group of teachers were certified under her direction. In 2000 Miss Dunham granted Dr. Rose the title of Master Teacher and Director of Dunham Technique Certification.
FOREWORD CO-WRITTEN BY: Halifu Osumare, PhD
Dr. 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 dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham and a Certified Instructor of Dunham Dance Technique. Dr. Osumare has performed, taught, and conducted research not only in the U.S., but also in Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya, and in Brazil. 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.
THE LEGACY OF KATHERINE DUNHAM
About Ms. Dunham
About Ms. Dunham
About Ms. Dunham
Katherine Dunham (1909-2006) was a scholar-artist-activist committed to humanist work in theory and in practice. She was a dance anthropologist, a theorist, a founder of her own dance company, mentor, educator, and creator of the renowned Dunham Technique, which revolutionized dance. She traveled to 60 countries sharing her genius and graced the big screen in movies like Stormy Weather.
Ms. Dunham's commitment to local communities and international engagement meant that she led a life that was at once widely heralded and simultaneously marginalized by mainstream academics. This edited volume seeks to build on the recognition of Ms. Dunham's scholar-artist-activist legacy by recognizing her work as an embodied scholar of African Diaspora studies. Ms. Dunham is an inspiration for an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to collaboratively studying arts, sciences, and humanities. [photo credit: Dwight Carter]
The Library of Congress collection offers a timeline, interviews, photos, and moving images from Ms. Dunham's research and work.
About IDTC
About Ms. Dunham
About Ms. Dunham
The Institute for Dunham Technique Certification was created in 1993 by Dr. Albirda Rose, with the approval and input of Katherine Dunham. In 1993, Katherine Dunham and Dr. Rose invited ten dancers to pursue Dunham Teacher Certification under the newly developed process of certification. This first group of dancers started the process after 10 years of attendance to the Dunham Technique Seminar and years of experience teaching Dunham Technique.
Since Miss Dunham’s passing in 2006, IDTC, a mostly working volunteer collective, has continued to grow the Dunham community, which includes refining and reimagining the certification process to best train the next generation of expert teachers of the Dunham Technique. [photo credit: IDTC]