Halifu Osumare, Ph.D.

Black Popular Culture and Dance Studies Scholar

Dr. Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita of African American & African Studies at University of California, Davis, and is recognized as a scholar, dancer, choreographer, and cultural activist for over forty years. As a recognized global hip-hop studies scholar, she wrote The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (2007) and The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop (2012). As a dancer in the 1970s, she was a soloist with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company of New York.

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. Dr. Osumare published Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir in 2018, winning the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics and the American Book Award. In January 2024 she published her sequel memoir, Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy, and starts a national book tour in February. In Dancing the Afrofuture Osumare illuminates the resilience of African descendant peoples through performance and the the lens of Afrofuturism. Dr. Osumare’s career “dances” across several fields, from Black Dance to Global Pop Culture, as she has dedicated her life, like her mentor dancer-anthropologist Katherine Dunham, to the arts and humanities for a better world.