Professor Halifu Osumare is currently Associate Professor and Director of African American and African Studies at University of California, Davis. She has been a dancer, choreographer, arts administrator, and scholar of black popular culture for over thirty years. She has accomplished many of these roles not only in the U.S., but also in Africa in the countries of Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, and Kenya. Her teaching and writing spans the traditional African to the contemporary African American, to which her 2007 book, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves, testifies. Her new book The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop is planned for 2012, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan.

She holds a M.A. in Dance Ethnology from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. In 2008 Dr. Osumare received a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the University of Ghana’s Department of Dance Studies, while she was conducting research on the effects of hip-hop culture in the capital city of Accra.

As a dance educator, she is a Certified Instructor of the Katherine Dunham Technique, and has served on the dance faculties of Bowling Green State University in Ohio for five years and Stanford University for thirteen years. As an arts administrator, she was the former Program Coordinator for Stanford’s Committee on Black Performing Arts and the Founder of CitiCentre Dance Theatre in Oakland. As her mentor, the famed dancer-anthropologist-scholar Katherine Dunham, she combines scholarship, the arts, and community activism as her mission in life.

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