Skip to main content

Ava LaVonne Vinesett

Professor of the Practice of Dance
Dance Program
Box 90686, Durham, NC 27708-0686
2020 Campus Drive, Suite 209D, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours By appointment ava@duke.edu  

Overview


Through my choreographic lens, I explore how the body becomes a site of memory, history, and cultural narrative. My research focuses on Black visibility in public spaces and collective memory, examining African-based dance practices of healing in the American South, Cuba, Brazil, Ecuador, and the Caribbean. These traditions, deeply intertwined with movement, inspired the co-founding of Indigo Yard Gals (IYG), a collective that engages dance, ritual, and healing as transformative practices. 

My artistic work is rooted in the transmission of African diaspora dance legacies and their evolving presence in contemporary spaces. I research, choreograph, and perform to deepen the living art of African diaspora dance, exploring its connection to personal and collective identity through the physical articulation of cultural beliefs. Dance is an expression of perseverance—a creative continuation of cultural mores. It is both political and personal.

As a founding member of the Chuck Davis African American Dance Ensemble, I ground my creative process in the understanding of dance as both a historical resource and a gesture toward futurity. As an archive, dance embodies and transmits traditions, offering present-day access to earlier forms that often persist primarily within dance-related rituals. The evolving identity of dance creates a framework for analyzing its aesthetic, technical, ceremonial, spiritual, and sacred tenets—elements that shape both traditional African and African-derived dance forms. This concept serves as the foundation of my past work and continues to inform the thematic core of my present projects.

To articulate my process, I coined the term dance translator—a methodology that examines my personal voice in dance. Using my body as text, I communicate an existing legacy of religious, spiritual, and cultural beliefs through movement. Drawing from King’s radical interdisciplinarity, Lorde’s biomythography, and Hartman’s critical fabulation, I interrogate and reimagine histories that have often been silenced. My storytelling practice binds past, present, and future, centering Black narratives through embodied memory and performance.

Through Indigo Yard Gals (IYG), I engage deeply with social justice, environmental activism, identity, and imagination. Our projects cultivate conversations that bridge community, culture, and imagined futures, widening the scope of dance, ritual, and healing as catalysts for transformation.

Current Duke Appointments & Affiliations


Professor of the Practice of Dance · 2020 - Present Dance Program, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Director of the Dance Program · 2026 - Present Dance Program, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

Recent News Items


Published April 13, 2022
Dancers Explore Legacies of Freedom in African Brazilian Dance
Published November 11, 2015
Duke's November Dances to Feature Flamenco for First Time
Published March 24, 2014
Duke University Hosts Spring Dance Concert

View All News Items

Recent Scholarly Works


Once on This Island

Artistic production · October 2019 Musical by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty; directed by Sophie Caplin and featuring the Duke Players and Amandla Choir. Branson Theater. October 21-22, 27-29, 2019. ... Cite

Kanyalang

Artistic production · March 30, 2019 Commissioned work for E. Gwynn and Dancers Company. In the Senegambia, Mandinka women establish support organizations to help address social conflicts. In this setting, women celebrate one another and demonstrate their female power as the source of life. ... Cite

Restaginf of Yansã the Tempest.

Artistic production · 2019 Based on research of the Candomblé religion in Salvador da Bahia, Yansã, the only female orixá, or divinity represents transformation. Created for the Duke African Repertory Ensemble. Musical arrangement by: Richard J. Vinesett using traditional music ... Cite
View All Scholarly Works

Education


University of North Carolina, Greensboro · 1998 M.F.A.
North Carolina Central University · 1987 B.A.