ARTIST/SCHOLAR BIO

Dr. Ayo Walker is a Performance Studies Practitioner, Choreographer, and Dance and African American Studies Educator. Currently an Assistant Professor of Critical Dance Studies at Columbia College Chicago and a dance faculty member for Rennie Harris University, she positions her work in the field of Dance and Performance Studies within three specific interdisciplinary and generative frameworks: Research-to-Performance; Practice-Based; and Practice-Led. 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 work, 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 project-based dance company-Ayo & Company-her works have been commissioned by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, PUSHfest, National Dance Education Organization (NDEO), Sacramento/Black Art of Dance (S/BAD), and the Rhythmically Speaking Dance Company as well as the Modern American Dance Company (MADCO). Ayo & Company recently premiered one of her latest works, “Jadine’s Son” at both the 2022 We Create Festival: BIPOC Legacy in the Arts and the BIG MUDDY Dance Festival. This work was recently commissioned by the International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) 33^rd annual Conference and Festival.

“P-I-E-C-E-S,” another one of her latest works was recently selected to represent the 2023 Southeast Conference at ACDA’s 2023 National College Dance Festival.