Michele Byrd Mcphee

Michele Byrd-McPhee is a dancer, choreographer, cultural organizer and educator whose work centers Black and Brown women's authorship, histories and lived expertise in street and club dance culture. She holds a bachelor's degree from Temple University and a master's degree in nonprofit arts management from Drexel University, and has held production roles at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and *Late Night with Seth Meyers*.

Byrd-McPhee began organizing women street dancers in Philadelphia after encountering a lack of sisterhood and representation in male-dominated Hip-Hop spaces. That response led to the founding of Ladies of Hip Hop, which traces its organizational history to 2004. As founder and executive director, she has built Ladies of Hip Hop into a platform that empowers girls and women while preserving Hip-Hop through a female lens, supported by the LOHH Dance Collective, which brings freestyle, cipher and call-and-response practices into proscenium performance while resisting the idea that concert presentation must sever street and club forms from their communities.

In 2008 the Leeway Foundation awarded Byrd-McPhee an Art and Change Grant and a Transformation Award, marking early recognition of work that combined choreography with structural advocacy. In 2020 she received the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Integrated Arts Residency Fellowship and created the course *Hip-Hop, Women and the World*. From 2021 through 2024, a partnership with SNIPES USA supported a woman-led, woman-owned and women-focused New York street-dance and arts studio. Her Black Dancing Bodies project began collecting and staging the contributions of Black women in street and club dance.

In 2023 the New York Dance and Performance Awards honored Byrd-McPhee for Outstanding Service to the Field. That year she was also represented in Philadelphia's permanent *Know the Elements* mural, created by Christian "TAME ARTZ" Rodriguez and Bill Strobel for Hip-Hop's fiftieth anniversary. By 2025 Byrd-McPhee had joined the University of Massachusetts Amherst as Assistant Professor of Dance, where her teaching includes Hip-Hop dance, Black performance theory, street and club dance histories, cultural studies and entrepreneurship for artists. In 2024 she began a research fellowship at NYU's Center for Ballet and the Arts to develop Black Dancing Bodies.