Halifu Osumare has been involved with dance and black popular culture internationally for over thirty years as a dancer, choreographer, teacher, administrator and scholar. She is currently a 2008-9 Fulbright Scholar, teaching at the University of Ghana, at Legon in the Department of Dance and doing research on the effects of hip-hop culture in the capital city of Accra. 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. She is currently Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at University of California, Davis, and her book, The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves (2007), is published by Palgrave Macmillan. Dr. Osumare, as a dance educator, 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 well as the Founder of the national dance initiative Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century that took place from 1989-1992 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

Besides her book, Dr. Osumare is a published author of several journal articles and book chapters. Her most recent publication is the book chapter, “The Dance Archeology of Rennie Harris: Hip-Hop or Postmodern,” in Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader by University of Illinois Press, 2008. She has combined her interest in Dance Studies and black popular culture in her current research agenda of exploring the many dimensions of hip-hop culture. Her research during her Fulbright Fellowship will be a continuation of her interest in the globalization of hip-hop by studying the specifics of Ghanaians’ adaptation of the youth culture in their “hip-life” music and dance scene in Accra. As a dancer in the 1970s, she was a soloist with the Rod Rodgers Dance of New York City. She is noted particularly as a Director/Choreographer with the works of 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 For Colored Girls, 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. Her vision of the arts, like Miss Dunham’s, is their relevance to and total involvement in the humanities.

Veiw CV.