Photo credit : Alexandra Gelbard
Dr. Hume was recently honored with the Richard A. Long Award for her outstanding research and creative practice advancing knowledge in Africana Dance. The award was presented by Dr. C. Kemal Nance, Executive Board member of The Collegium of African Diaspora Dance (CADD), during their conference at Duke University.This recognition marks a profound full-circle moment in Dr. Hume’s intellectual and creative journey. Nearly three decades ago, as a doctoral student at Emory University in Richard A. Long’s “Arts of the African Diaspora” course, she encountered a framework that affirmed Black expressive culture as a vital site of knowledge production. To now receive an award bearing his name is not only an academic honor, but a deeply personal and ancestral affirmation—one that speaks to continuity, mentorship, and the unfolding of a life dedicated to the sacred labor of dance.
2026 Recipient of the Richard A. Long Award
Dr. Hume’s work is distinguished by its refusal to separate the intellectual, the artistic, and the spiritual. As a scholar, dancer, and ritual practitioner, she advances an interdisciplinary methodology that positions Africana dance not simply as performance, but as a living archive and epistemological system. Her research traverses Caribbean Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, Anthropology, and Comparative Religion, while remaining firmly grounded in embodied practice and ancestral knowledge systems rooted in Afro-Caribbean and Africana Religious diasporic traditions.
Afro-Feminist Performance Routes 2020: The Artists Speak
Afro-Feminist Performance Routes is a focused residency that continues urgent embodied dialogues around African diaspora dance practices and gender, femininity, womanhood, femme, and …
“Embodied practice, the art of learning through experience and intercultural awareness”
Centering my practice within the realm of the sacred presents many possibilities for cultivating collectivities while allowing the individual to also blossom. The spiritual systems that have served communities across the Afro-Atlantic are inherently participatory. They call us to assemble, to enter a divine circle – a place of intimacy, safety and above all else, inclusivity.