ABOUT ME
Academia
Dr. Ofosuwa M. Abiola is a scholar of African and African Diaspora dance, cultural history, and embodied knowledge systems. She serves as Dean of the Graduate School at Bowie State University, where she leads initiatives that expand interdisciplinary research, graduate education, and scholarly innovation across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and emerging technological fields.
Dr. Abiola is the creator of Afrikinesis, an award-winning framework for studying African and African Diaspora dance traditions through an African-centered analytical lens. The Afrikinesis framework interprets movement, aesthetics, and performance practices as systems of embodied knowledge through which communities preserve and transmit historical memory, cultural philosophy, and social meaning. Afrikinesis provides scholars with a methodological approach for examining African and African-derived dance traditions as archives of cultural and historical knowledge.
Dr. Abiola is the author of several influential books, including Afrikinesis: A Paradigm for Research on African and African Diaspora Dance, History Dances: Chronicling the History of Traditional Mandinka Dance, and Historical Perspectives on Dance in Africa. She is also editor of the monograph, Fire Under My Feet: History, Race and Agency in African Diaspora Dance. Throughout her scholarship, Dr. Abiola traces how movement carries memory, identity, and cultural knowledge across generations and geographies. She investigates dance as archive; living, embodied, and evolving, revealing how African and diasporic forms speak through the body even when words fail.
Her scholarship and public humanities work have received numerous recognitions, including the Outstanding Dance Education Researcher Award from the National Dance Education Organization, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers Research Award for the top-ranked research proposal, and the Washington, DC Archives Award for her Public History Lecture Series. She is also a recipient of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Master Folk Artist Award, honoring her contributions to the preservation and transmission of traditional cultural knowledge.
In addition to her books and research, Dr. Abiola is developing several initiatives that expand the global study of embodied knowledge. These include Voiceless Shouts: Unruly Arts & Embodied Resistance, a peer-reviewed journal that examines how creative and performative practices function as sites of theory, archives of history, and modes of political and cultural intervention. Her current research initiatives explore the intersection of movement traditions, digital preservation, and artificial intelligence, including projects that investigate culturally intelligent motion models for African dance.
Through her scholarship, publishing initiatives, and leadership in graduate education, Dr. Abiola works to expand how scholars, artists, and institutions understand embodied knowledge as a vital source of intellectual insight, cultural history, and creative innovation.
My Books
Before Academia
Dr. Abiola founded the African dance company Suwabi African Ballet. She served as the company's Artistic Director for 15 years.
Before establishing her theoretical framework of Afrikinesis, Dr. Ofosuwa Abiola spent over three decades engaging in an exhaustive, performance-based exploration of African and African Diaspora dance. This period served as the foundational "fieldwork" for her later academic contributions, where the stage functioned as a site for both historical preservation and kinetic inquiry.
As the founder and Artistic Director of the Suwabi African Ballet for 15 years, Dr. Abiola pioneered a research-to-performance methodology. Rather than merely staging dances, she directed, choreographed, and produced large-scale "historical African dance ballets" that functioned as embodied archives. Works such as The Dismal Swamp, Waters of Despair, Waters of Hope, and Imhotep were not just artistic expressions; they were early investigations into how traditional movement encodes history, resistance, and memory, themes that would eventually define her doctoral research at Howard University.
Dr. Abiola’s academic journey is deeply informed by 20 years of international performance and pedagogy. Her time touring with the Corichow Dance Company in the Gambia (Kololi, Serrekunda, and Banjul) provided a rare, immersive vantage point into the pedagogical structures of West African dance. This firsthand experience, contrasted with her training in classical ballet, modern, and jazz, allowed her to identify the specific "kinetic epistemologies" unique to the African Diaspora. From the S.S. Rotterdam to the National Folk Arts Festival and Arena Stage, her diverse performance venues served as global data points for her later comparative analyses.
Her transition into the Academy was preceded by significant roles in arts leadership and public humanities. Serving as Artist-in-Residence at the historic Attucks Theatre and the Governor’s School for the Arts, Dr. Abiola bridged the gap between community-based knowledge and institutional curriculum. Her recognition as a VFH Master Folk Artist and her inclusion in In Good Keeping: Virginia’s Folklife Apprenticeships underscore her status as a primary keeper of the traditions she now theorizes. Ultimately, her career is a testament to the "Unruly Arts"—a journey where the physical rigor of 1,000+ performances evolved into the intellectual rigor of the Afrikinesis paradigm.