In May 2024, I began the 2024-2025 academic year by attending the Ayodele West African Drum and Dance Conference in Chicago, which took place from May 10th-12th. During this conference, I participated in several dance classes led by master instructors and attended their concert Ayodele Presents: HERStory too Tell: Femme en Liberté. This performance explored the transformative power of African drum and dance, focusing on women breaking free from various forms of oppression—whether physical, psychological, or social—and reclaiming their own understandings of love and joy.

Following my participation in the Ayodele Conference, I further immersed myself in dance research by attending Umfundalai’s Contemporary African Summer Dance Intensive at the University of Illinois Urbana—Champaign, led by Master Teacher Monique Newton Walker and Senior Master Teacher Dr. Kemal Nance. This intensive was particularly significant as it marked my returned to embodied research after a year of recovery from injury. As a scholar invested in the study of Black women’s innovations and interventions in diasporic dance and performance, I prioritized re-engaging with movement-based methodologies to deepen my understanding of how embodied knowledge operates within Black performance traditions.

The Umfundalai intensive was rigorous, totaling more than 40 hours of intensive dance training over the course of the week. Under the guidance of Mama Monique (Walker) and Baba Oluko (Nance), I studied Umfundalai, a contemporary African dance technique developed by progenitor, Dr. Kariamu Welsh. Having previously written scholarly reviews of Dr. Welsh’s work, this experience allowed me to engage with her technique in a more immersive, physical way. The intensive culminated in a public performance at the opening of the new dance studio at the university, reinforcing the role of performance as both a research tool and a communal practice.

This experience became the catalyst for my decision to pursue the M’Singha Wuti Teaching Certificate, a training program designed to prepare dancers and educators to share the Umfundalai technique with amateur and recreational dance communities. The certification process requires five months of training across multiple weekend intensives, culminating in a series of evaluations, including a public teaching demonstration. The final stage of this certification will take place at the Nanigo gathering from June 19th-21st in Chicago, where artist from across the U.S. will convene to deepen their engagement with African diasporic dance forms.

In addition to my embodied research, I also shared my scholarly work as a member of the New Scholars Forum for the International Federation of Theatre Research (IFTR). As part of this forum, I presented my work titled “Birthing Black Futures: T(HER)d-Space, the Detroit Jit, and the Tragic Black Mother in the Musical Blue,” at the IFTR Conference, which was held at the University of the Philippines Manila in July 2024. This presentation allowed me to engage in interdisciplinary discussions about the role of tragedy in musicals, particularly within the context of Black motherhood in the U.S.

My paper examined how the musical Blue, which debut at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre in Detroit, Michigan, in September 2021, portrays Black mothering as both a site of resilience and sorrow. By analyzing Blue through the lens of the Detroit Jit, I explored how movement and performance work to reframe narratives of loss, survival, and futurity in Black mothers in contemporary musical theatre. This research contributes to broader conversations about how Black performance traditions, including street dances like the Jit, intervene in the genre of musical theatre to disrupt conventional representations of Black womanhood.

In addition to my paper examining the musical Blue, I also presented at the National Women’s Studies Association 44th Conference, where I delivered a paper titled, “T(HER)d-space: Black Women, Performance, and the Disrupted Gaze.” This paper introduced t(HER)d-space as a theoretical framework to explore how Black women’s participation in traditionally male-dominated performance spaces offers critical insight into the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality within specific cultural contexts. By focusing on three distinct groups—queer exotic dancers in male strip clubs, Black women who perform a local style of dance called the Detroit Jit, and HBCU women drum majors and percussionists—my paper argues that their presence and performance within these spaces disrupt multiple prescriptive gazes. Their participation functions as a site of generative lived politics, linked to broader historical structures of misogynoir, heteronormativity, and Black patriarchy.

I received overwhelmingly positive feedback on this theoretical framework, and am currently developing it further for a chapter contribution to an anthology edited by Thomas DeFrantz, which I have been invited to submit.

Additionally, I submitted a fictional piece titled, “What’s a Black Girl to Do?” to Callaloo journal .

Lastly, I served as the Primary Investigator (PI) on the Partnership for Innovative Research in Africa (PIRA) grant, which is designed to cultivate and support multi-directional collaborative research partnerships at any stage of their development, whether they are initiatives to explore and create new relationships or scale existing ones. During my site visit at the University of Ghana, I engaged in discussions with Dr. Kofi Anthonio in the Dance Department at the School for Performing Arts and Dr. Deborah Atobrah, Director of the Center for Gender Equity and Advocacy, to brainstorm ways in which the arts—both theatre and dance—can be used to bring attention to gender equality within the Black community in the U.S. and Ghanaian society. Building upon my previous collaborative work with Professor Sylvia Nannyonga-Tamusuza, a Professor of Ethnomusicology at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, we developed a grant proposal that position Ugandan, Ghanaian, and Black American social issues of gender inequality in conversation, utilizing the arts as a lens for exploration. Collaborating across these three cultural contexts required extensive time, thought, and communication. Our project, “From Kampala to Accra to Detroit: Gender, Performance, Cultural Expressions, and Social Change in Africa and the Diaspora,” aimed to explore gender performance across the African diaspora through an intercultural lens. The primary objective was to investigate how gender identities and expressions are performed, perceived, and transformed within various cultural context, particularly in African and African-descended communities. Although we were not successful in securing the grant, we remain in active discussions about revising and resubmitting it for future opportunities.

Overall, my research this year has continued to expand meaningful ways, bridging performance studies, Black feminist thought, and cultural analysis. Through conference presentations, embodied research, invited contributions, and ongoing writing projects , I have deepened my engagement with critical conversations on race, gender, and performance. Moving forward, I am excited to refine and publish my work while exploring new avenues for interdisciplinary scholarship and collaboration.