Katherine Dunham was an American dancer, choreographer, and company director as well as an author, educator, and social activist. Dunham had one of the most successful dance careers in American and European theater of the 20th century and has been called the "matriarch and queen mother of black dance." During her heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, Dunham was renowned throughout Europe and Latin America and was widely popular in the United States, where the Washington Post called her "dance's Katherine the Great." For almost thirty years she maintained the Katherine Dunham Dance Company, the only... self-supported American black dance troupe at that time, and over her long career she choreographed more than ninety individual dances. Dunham was an innovator in African-American modern dance as well as a leader in the field of dance anthropology, or ethnochoreology. Katherine Mary Dunham was born in June 1909 in a Chicago hospital and taken as an infant to her parents' home in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a village about fifteen miles west of Chicago. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, was a descendant of slaves from West Africa and Madagascar.
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