Naomi Diouf

Naomi Gedo Diouf is a Liberian culture bearer and dance educator who grew up in Monrovia and began learning dance at age five from her mother and grandmother. She trained at the Kendeja Cultural Center for Indigenous Performers, where she encountered not only Liberian forms but dancers and musicians from across West Africa, and studied under Constance Taul of the Paris Ballet, an experience that deepened her comparative knowledge while keeping community-specific traditions at the center of her practice.

Diouf first came to the United States in 1972 as a high-school exchange student through Youth for Understanding and returned to Liberia after a year. She came back to the United States in 1974 for university study. In 1979 she met Senegalese dancer, musician, and scholar Zakarya Sao Diouf, who invited her to join the company he had founded in 1975. Their artistic and personal partnership joined Liberian and Senegalese experience while continuing to identify dances by their distinct national, regional, and ethnic sources.

When the couple settled in the Bay Area in 1987, Naomi Diouf became the artistic leader of Diamano Coura West African Dance Company in Oakland. The company's repertory includes traditions connected to Liberia, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and the Gambia, with dances specifically identified as belonging to Kpellé, Kru, Vai, Gio, Loma, and Grebo communities. This specificity shapes Diouf's entire practice: her work resists treating the region as a single undifferentiated style.

Diouf built a substantial career in public education, teaching African dance at Berkeley High School for twenty-eight years, where she expanded and led the Afro-Haitian Dance Program and chaired the African American Studies Department. She also taught at Laney College and in schools across California and internationally, making arts education integral to cultural preservation. In 2019 Berkeley honored her retirement from the high-school program with a city proclamation while she continued her company leadership.

Her choreography and consultation extended beyond Diamano Coura to professional companies and productions including *Lambarena*, which brought Bach and African music and dance into dialogue, where she served as a consultant on the fusion choreography and music. Diamano Coura's profile also documents work in theater, university settings, and international contexts. In 2020 the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Zakarya and Naomi Diouf a joint National Heritage Fellowship as West African diasporic dancers, recognizing more than four decades of cultural practice and transmission. After Zakarya's death in 2021, Naomi continued to lead Diamano Coura and represent the fellowship in national gatherings, demonstrating that cultural preservation combines rigorous source knowledge, costume, song, history, community responsibility, and the changing realities of diasporic life.