Brenda Dixon Gottschild, author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance, Waltzing in the Dark, and The Black Dancing Body, is Professor Emerita of Dance Studies at Temple University, USA, and a former senior consultant and writer for Dance Magazine. She lectures nationally and internationally, using her own dancing/thinking body to illustrate her ideas and blur the division between practice and theory. She is the recipient of the 2013 Scholar Award from the International Association of Blacks in Dance.