Esteemed artist-scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, PhD, is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, performer, lecturer and professor emerita of dance studies at Temple University. She is the author of four books centering Black dance artists and forms: Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era; The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool; and Joan Myers Brown & The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina: A Biohistory of American Performance.