Lenora Antoinette Stines, professionally known as Dr

Lenora Antoinette Stines is a Jamaican choreographer, dancer, educator and cultural scholar whose work has centered Afro-Caribbean body knowledge and Jamaican dance forms within professional contemporary training. In 1978, Stines founded L'Acadco in Miami, described in institutional and journalistic accounts as the city's first Black dance company. Its early mission brought together Black, Hispanic and white communities through dance. After returning to Jamaica in the early 1980s, she re-established L'Acadco as A United Caribbean Dance Force, a vehicle for concert work rooted in Jamaican and wider Caribbean movement. Rather than treating folk practice as decorative source material, the company positioned Caribbean forms as intellectual and technical systems in their own right.

Stines developed L'Antech, a codified contemporary training approach drawing on forms including Kumina, Bruckins, Nyabinghi and dancehall alongside ballet and modern-dance knowledge. She has described this work through the term "daaance," emphasizing ancestral memory, spirituality, identity and the lived Caribbean body. L'Antech organizes movement through grounded weight, articulated pelvis and spine, polyrhythmic coordination, and gesture tied to cultural memory—a dynamic exchange between ritual reference and theatrical composition.

Her career has combined choreography, teaching, scholarship, writing and cultural consultancy. In 1984, Stines presented Bouyaka Bouyaka, frequently cited as an early proscenium staging of dancehall. She completed doctoral research in Cultural Studies at the University of the West Indies and published Soul Casings, which explains the philosophical journey behind L'Antech. She has also worked on large public productions, including serving as movement director and lead choreographer for the Jamaica segment of the ICC Cricket World Cup opening ceremony in 2007.

In 2023, the Institute of Jamaica awarded Stines the Silver Musgrave Medal in the arts. Jamaica's Ministry of Culture identified her among that year's recipients as a choreographer, author and dancer. As of 2025, UWI Cave Hill continued to present her as a master teacher and lecturer, evidence that her influence joins repertory legacy with active pedagogy.