Katherine Dunham

Katherine Mary Dunham was born on the twenty-second of June 1909 at Glen Ellyn, Illinois, the daughter of Albert Millard Dunham — a Black tailor and dry-cleaner of mixed African and Madagascan descent — and Fanny June Taylor Dunham, a French-Canadian-American schoolteacher who died of complications of cancer when Katherine was four. She was raised by her father and his second wife Annette Poindexter Dunham in the Joliet, Illinois Black-and-French-Canadian household of the closing years of the 1910s.

She was placed at the Joliet Township High School and at the Joliet Junior College for two years from 1928 to 1930 before transferring to the University of Chicago in 1930 to study anthropology under the principal American anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits — at the University of Chicago anthropology department’s Africanist-anthropology programme. She completed the bachelor’s in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1936 and the master’s in 1947 — among the early Black-American anthropologists of the post-war period.

She took the Rosenwald-Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935 for a year-long field research at the Caribbean Black-traditional-dance communities — at Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique and Trinidad. The 1935–1936 Caribbean field research at Haiti was the principal source of the Dunham post-war Caribbean-and-Africanist choreographic programme.

She founded in 1937 at Chicago the Katherine Dunham Dance Company — the first sustained Black-American concert-dance company — at the corner of South Parkway and Fifty-First Street, Chicago. The Company moved its principal Manhattan base of operations to the Forty-Eighth Street Theatre at New York at the close of 1939.

She directed across the following thirty years the Katherine Dunham Dance Company — predominantly on the principal Caribbean-and-Africanist-modernist-concert-dance choreographic synthesis of the post-war period. The Company toured the principal European and Latin American capitals of the post-war period under the Dunham personal direction — at over fifty cities across thirty-three countries between 1947 and 1967.

She was the principal choreographer of over thirty-five Broadway and motion-picture choreographic-and-dance productions of the post-war period — including the principal Broadway productions Cabin in the Sky (1940), Pins and Needles (1937), and the major motion pictures Stormy Weather (1943) and Casbah (1948).

She founded in 1944 the Katherine Dunham School of Dance and Theatre at Manhattan — the principal Black-American modernist-dance training school of the post-war period — and trained at the School the principal Black-American post-war modernist-dance generation: Janet Collins (placed in this archive), Talley Beatty (placed in this archive), Vanoye Aikens, Vivienne Brown, Lavinia Williams (placed in this archive), and over a thousand additional Dunham-method students.

She relocated her base of operations in 1967 to East Saint Louis, Illinois — at the East Saint Louis branch of the Southern Illinois University, where she was the principal artistic director of the Performing Arts Training Center from 1967 to 1980. She conducted the principal Black-American community-arts development programme at East Saint Louis across the period.

She was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors on the eleventh of December 1983.

She died at New York on the twenty-first of May 2006 of natural causes, at ninety-six.

She is honored here as the founder of the Katherine Dunham Dance Company.