Alma M

Alma M. Hawkins was born in 1904 in Rolla, Missouri, at a time when formal dance training was scarce in rural America. She entered movement through athletics and physical education at the University of Missouri, where interpretive, folk and social dance broadened her understanding of what bodily education could encompass. Before independent dance departments existed in American universities, dance typically lived within women's physical education programs—a positioning that would shape Hawkins's later institutional work.

Hawkins pursued graduate study at Teachers College, Columbia University, completing an EdD in physical education in 1949. Her dissertation became the book *The Modern Dance in Higher Education*, an argument that dance merited rigorous study as an art and creative discipline in its own right. She treated technique, composition, history and performance as interconnected rather than reducing dance to exercise or recreation.

In 1953 Hawkins joined UCLA's physical education faculty to lead its dance program. By 1962 she had developed an autonomous Department of Dance within the College of Fine Arts, with status parallel to art, music and theatre. UCLA describes it as the nation's first autonomous university dance department of its type. Hawkins built graduate study, secured foundation support and brought major companies to campus, establishing the department as a meeting point for artistic practice, scholarship and public performance.

Beyond UCLA, Hawkins participated in national conversations about dance curriculum, professional standards and dance's place in higher education. She also supported the emerging field of dance and movement therapy, where creative movement was understood as a means of expression and psychological integration—work that shared intellectual space with practitioners including Marian Chace and Mary Starks Whitehouse, who developed distinct clinical and experiential lineages.

Hawkins's later books focused closely on the creative process itself. *Creating Through Dance* and *Moving from Within: A New Method for Dance Making* organized choreography around sensing, feeling, shaping and transforming experience. The method combines conceptual structure with freedom to explore, asking dancers to discover form through attentive movement rather than assemble learned steps.

Hawkins died in Santa Monica on January 8, 1998, at age 93. Her papers, preserved through the UCLA Library and described by the Online Archive of California, document teaching, administration, writing and the development of university dance across decades. UCLA's Alma Hawkins Memorial Visiting Chair continues her name through artist residencies, evidence that her legacy lives not only in institutional history but in an ongoing commitment to choreographic inquiry.