Shani Diouf

Shani Diouf has performed with contemporary and African dance companies such as The National Dance Company of Ghana, Saakumu Dance Troupe of Ghana West Africa, UrbanSouls Dance Company and Second-Generation Dance Company. She has studied with Bernard Woma, Dr. Paschale Younge, Dr. Zelma Badu-Younge, Torgbui Midawo Gideon Foli Alorwovie and Sulley Imoro among others. She first traveled to Ghana in 2005 and returned the following year as a Fulbright Scholar while researching how traditional dances change as they travel from the village to the performance stage. While in Ghana she set choreography on The National Company and also performed Musu: Saga of the Slaves and Cape Coast Slave Dungeon during the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade with British colonies. She has studied at Houston’s Performing and Visual Arts High School, a scholarship recipient to the Alvin Ailey School, Houston Ballet, and Jacob’s Pillow Cultural Traditions Program where she had the pleasure of studying the Dunham technique from Katherine Dunham, Walter Nicks, and Joe Nash.

Diouf has conducted research in the U.S., Ghana, Senegal and Morocco, primarily focusing on African dance traditions and their connections to dance in the U.S. She holds a MA in religious studies from Rice University where her thesis asserted that African American religious dance can be both inclusive of secular dance and a religious experience simultaneously. She also has an MFA in dance performance and choreography from Florida State University and a BS in Dance (summa cum laude) from Lamar University. She is also a certified Kemetic yoga instructor and has been a dance professor at Houston Community College for the past 17 years where she founded and organized The Akwaaba Dance and Drum Festival, aimed at celebrating the beauty and diversity of African music and dance as well as dances of the diaspora.

Diouf has also taught West African dance at Kinder High School for the Performing and Visual Arts for the past 10 years. She has given lecture/performances about the connections between traditional West African Dance and African American Praise Dance at the University of Cape Coast during Pana Fest in Ghana, West Africa, at Duke University’s CADD (Collegium for African Diaspora Dance), and at the Santa Fe Soul Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was also an artist in residence at Green Olive Arts in Tetouan Morocco where she performed work that she created after exploring the relationship between religion and the body while there.

Diouf is a PhD student at TWU where she is researching the intricacies of what happens to dances of the diaspora as they migrate, specifically between West Africa and the United States, a phenomenon she call "Rehoming Dance."