Joann Wheeler Kealiinohomoku

Joann Wheeler Kealiinohomoku was an anthropologist and dance ethnologist who fundamentally changed how scholars understand dance. Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1930, she completed a Bachelor of Specialized Studies at Northwestern University in 1955 and went on to earn a master's degree there in 1965. During the early 1960s, while reviewing dance for the *Honolulu Star-Bulletin* from 1960 to 1963, she began developing the comparative and anthropological lens that would define her career.

Kealiinohomoku's most influential work was the essay "An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance," first published in *Impulse* around 1969 with later widely circulated reprints dated 1970. The essay's central argument was direct and transformative: the label "ethnic dance" should not be reserved for non-Western traditions, because ballet itself embodies the histories, values, bodies, social conventions and environments of the cultures that produced it. She exposed a double standard in dance writing that treated European theatrical dance as neutral while describing other traditions as exotic or instinctive.

She earned her PhD from Indiana University in 1976 with the dissertation *Theory and Methods for an Anthropological Study of Dance*. Her scholarly method treated dance events as integrated systems encompassing movement, music, dress, setting, belief and social relationship. She served on the board of the Congress on Research in Dance from 1974 to 1977 and became an associate professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University, later named professor emerita.

In 1981, Kealiinohomoku co-founded Cross-Cultural Dance Resources in Flagstaff, Arizona, conceived as a living research center to preserve collections, interviews, audiovisual media, field documentation and scholarship relating to dance and embodied knowledge. The CCDR holdings include the Gertrude Prokosch Kurath collection and Kealiinohomoku's own extensive research archive, now held and interpreted through Arizona State University.

Beyond academic circles, Kealiinohomoku brought anthropological expertise to public television as an adviser to WNET's eight-part series *Dancing*, first broadcast in 1993. The Congress on Research in Dance recognized her outstanding contribution to dance research with an award presented in the mid-1990s. She died in Flagstaff on December 2, 2015.