The Creator: Ife Michelle

Ife Michelle, a native of Charlotte, NC began her dance training through the North Carolina Performing Arts Academy at age 7. Her training through college (Fayetteville State University/Duke University) in Traditional West-African, Contemporary, Horton Modern Technique, Hip-Hop, Stilettos and Couture/Vouge dance styles. 

In her pre-professional career, Ife has danced with multiple companies including KOFFEE Modern Dance Company, DialeKt Dance Company, Black Millennium Runway Troupe, SHAE Movement African Arts and 4Thirty-Two Dance Company, where she also served as a choreographer. 

As a practicing choreographer and performance artist, Ife runs Ife Michelle Dance, whose mission is to challenge the misguided perceptions and understandings of Black Women through performative offerings. Additionally, Ife teaches community adult dance classes (The Nightcap) that creates a space Black Women to access ownership and agency of self through dance technique and choreography. 

A Graduate of Duke University’s MFA Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis, Ife’s artistic work strives to reclaim the identity of the Black Women/Black Womanhood through Black Woman Artists by facilitating and curating “Emancipated Spaces” where these artists can train, create, access artistic and economic opportunity, and allow witness of their art with empathy and care. In doing so, she hopes to establish more permissioned Black artists, fuller Black Woman, and regain the autonomy of their vast existence and ways of being.