Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita of African American & African Studies at University of California, Davis. She has been a dancer, choreographer, educator, cultural activist, and scholar for over forty years. She published The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop (2007) and The Hiplife in Ghana: West Africanist Indigenization of Hip-Hop (2012, and was a 2008 Fulbright Scholar to Ghana. She was a soloist with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company in the early 1970s and the Founder of Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century, a California dance Initiative, 1989-1995. Her recent Dancing in Blackness, A Memoir won the 2019 Selma Jeanne Cohen Prize in Dance Aesthetics and a National Book Award. Dr. Osumare was awarded the 2020 Distinction in Dance for performance, scholarship, and service to the field by Dance Studies Association.