Camille A. Brown is one of the most important dancers, choreographers, and directors of our time. She is a leader in African Diasporic Dance whose practice blends West African, Caribbean, Modern Dance, Jazz Dance on Broadway, and African American social dance traditions into her own unique vocabulary.
Camille A. Brown in NYC
E-Moves Festival 2026 ~ Camille A. Brown Masterclass and Talk 🇺🇸
Historic choreographer and director of dance, Broadway, film, opera, and television talks with Harlem Stage Artistic Director Dr. Indira Etwaroo
Apr 20, 2026, Mon, 6pm
$35
Into the Arc of Performing Arts History
Brown came up in Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, and as an Ailey guest artist, before founding Camille A. Brown & Dancers in 2006.
It’s notable how modern dance is a foundation for African Diasporic Dance in the United States. I think it’s because modern dance has a specific movement vocabulary, was the first dance space to accept Black artists, and is about storytelling in ways that contemporary dance is not. We have our own movement vocabulary and lots of stories to tell.
Today Brown works in dance, Broadway, film and television, opera, and community engagement. She takes African Diasporic Dance to many places it didn’t go before.
In 2022, she became the first Black woman to both direct and choreograph a Broadway play, “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf,” since Katherine Dunham, the mother of Black dance, did in 1955. Brown is a five-time Tony nominee. She also choreographed “Once on This Island,” “Choir Boy,” Alicia Keys’ “Hell’s Kitchen,” and “Gypsy.” She is directing and choreographing the Broadway revival of “Dreamgirls” which opens in fall 2026.
Brown choreographed “Porgy and Bess” for the Metropolitan Opera, and became the Met’s first Black woman director with the hit “Fire Shut Up In My Bones.”
In television, Brown’s credits include Amazon’s “Harlem,” and “Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert.” In film, she worked on Netflix’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” which was Chadwick Boseman’s final film role. It’s a very poignant story about how others benefit from Black creativity.
A Guggenheim Fellow, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and multiple Princess Grace Award winner, Camille A. Brown is a true force of nature. She is one of those artists who makes you wonder how they fit all that accomplishment into one lifetime.
I don’t remember where I read this, but Brown has said that at one point early in her career, she was in the studio and said to herself that she wouldn’t leave until she came up with something that was her and not anybody else. Being fully yourself is the pivotal moment when an artist’s career takes off.
Black Kinesics
I’m curious about her use of gestural vocabulary, or Black Kinesics. It’s communicating with body language.
Even though I was born and raised in Black and Latin communities in the States, I never encountered this. Yet my Afro-Indigenous Dominican family in the Dominican Republic communicates so much with gestures, that I have had to accept it, and learn their language.
In Spanish, these expressions are called “muecas.” I didn’t know it was a thing, and specifically an African and Diasporic thing until I looked at Brown’s work. But it definitely is a thing in my family. I used to make them speak, but won’t do that anymore. I have to respect their culture.
The African Diaspora has created its own parallel universe. You can be looking right at it, and not see it, unless you have been taught to read it. I may never fully understand it, but Afro-Puerto Ricans opened my eyes to this. Once you begin to see it, you start seeing it everywhere.
My biggest lesson in twenty years of trying to understand the Latin world, is that we are far more African and Indigenous than most of us have been taught, and that is just as true for Americans as it is for Latins.