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Katherine Dunham was an African American dancer-choreographer who acquainted audiences with the historical roots of Black dance by incorporating African American, Caribbean, African, and South American movement styles and themes into her ballets. In the late 1930s she founded the nation’s first self-supporting Black modern dance company. Her achievements came despite widespread racial discrimination, and she refused to perform at segregated theaters on tours of the South.

While an anthropology student at the University of Chicago (Ph.B., 1936), she formed a dance group that performed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1934 and with the Chicago Civic Opera in 1935–1936. As a graduate student, she undertook field studies in the Caribbean and Brazil with support from the Rosenwald and Guggenheim Foundations, which expanded her understanding of the dances and rituals on the continent. In 1938, she joined the Federal Theatre Project in Chicago and composed the ballet “L’Ag’Ya,” based on Caribbean dance, as well as “Tropics” (choreographed 1937) and “Le Jazz Hot” (1938), which were among many works based on her research. She choreographed “Aida” (1963) for New York’s Metropolitan Opera. She also choreographed and starred in dance sequences in such films as Carnival of Rhythm (1942), Stormy Weather (1943), and Casbah (1947). 

Dunham led special projects for African American high school students in Chicago; was artistic and technical director (1966–1967) to the president of Senegal; and served as artist-in-residence, and later professor, at Southern Illinois University, as well as director of the Performing Arts Training Centre and Dynamic Museum in East St. Louis, Illinois. Dunham was active in human rights causes, and in 1992 she staged a forty-seven-day hunger strike to protest the treatment of Haitian refugees. She was the author of many books, some published under the pseudonym Kaye Dunn, including Journey to Accompong (1946), A Touch of Innocence: Memoirs of Childhood (1959), Island Possessed (1969), and Dances of Haiti (1984).