Collection Spotlight: Katherine Dunham Selections

Last Updated on February 25, 2021

This collection contains moving and still images, highlighting the dancer’s early explorations as an anthropologist observing movement types and dance forms in Haiti, Trinidad, Martinique, and Jamaica as well as Dunham performing and teaching.

Collection resources

• Images
• Videos
• Notes on Dunham’s Work
• Katherine Dunham Timeline
• Katherine Dunham: A Life in Dance article

Blog posts & articles

• Bringing History and Dance Together: The World of Katherine Dunham Teaching with the Library of Congress blog March 27, 2014
• Katherine Dunham’s Caribbean Ethnographic Research Folklife Today February 10, 2021
• A Life in Dance: Dunham Created New Forms in Choreography Library of Congress Information Bulletin October 2002 – Vol. 61, No. 10
• Women’s History Month: Katherine Dunham In the Muse March 8, 2010

Politics and the Dancing Body online exhibition items

• Caribbean Culture Inspires Katherine Dunham
• Katherine Dunham’s L’Ag’Ya

Additional resources

• Katherine Dunham biography from PBS
• Katherine Dunham Centers for Arts & Humanities