Katherine Dunham

Katherine Dunham was an American dancer, choreographer, anthropologist and social activist who lived from 1909 to 2006, called the matriarch and queen mother of Black dance and one of the most renowned modern dance artists of the 20th century. While a student at the University of Chicago she also performed as a dancer, ran a dance school and earned an early bachelor's degree in anthropology, later traveling to the Caribbean to study the African diaspora before realizing her professional calling was performance and choreography. For almost 30 years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only self-supported American Black dance troupe of its time, choreographing more than ninety individual dances and developing the Dunham Technique, a method of movement supporting her dance works. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/