Ayo Walker

Dr. Ayo Walker is an Assistant Professor of Critical Dance Studies at Columbia College Chicago and the Hip Hop Pedagogy Dance instructor at Rennie Harris University. As an anti-racist educator utilizing culturally relevant and critical dance pedagogies, her praxis is committed to substantiating the techniques, vernaculars, and genealogies, and embodiment of historically marginalized and othered dance aesthetics in higher education dance spaces. Her general choreographic practice is rooted in visibilizing the “blood memories,” “aesthetic of the cool,” and the “get down” qualities evident in Africanist and Black dance aesthetics. These qualities represent the nature of the practice and how dancers of all backgrounds engaging with the practice and performance of these aesthetics, generates new knowledge contributing to the operational significance for this practice. All of which drives her duty as a complete artist/scholar to reflect the times viscerally and candidly, connecting the past with the present via staged representations of history on a loop. Employing social justice choreography representative of anti-essentialist movement that is at once exposing and undoing stereotypical assumptions historically signifying the Black body politic, her works challenge what performing Blackness is and isn’t. “Through my research, creative scholarship, and pedagogy I urge the much-needed cultivation of a comprehensive cultural dance literacy beyond the dominant Eurocentric perspective in the United States.” Performed by her dance company Ayo & Company her works have been commissioned by PUSHfest, Sacramento/Black Art of Dance (S/BAD), the Rhythmically Speaking Dance Company and the Modern American Dance Company (MADCO).