Keynote Speaker

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 forty 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 Dr. Osumare also won  the Dance Studies Association 2020 Distinction in Dance Award for lifetime achievement in  performance, scholarship and service to dance. Forthcoming in February 2024 is her sequel memoir,  Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy.  

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.