Michele Byrd-McPhee
Assistant Professor of Dance

Michele Byrd-McPhee is a street dancer, arts activist, and tireless advocate for girls and women who works to decolonize Hip-Hop culture along gender, sex, and cultural and socio-historic racial lines. With a bachelor’s degree from Temple University and a master’s degree from Drexel University, Byrd-Mcphee has worked in different sectors of the entertainment industry, including as production coordinator at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and senior music coordinator at Late Night with Seth Meyers. Winner of the 2023 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field, she won the 2020 Integrated Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she created and taught the course “Hip-Hop, Women and the World.”
Byrd-McPhee has also served as a grant panelist for the McKnight Foundation, DanceNYC, and as a voting member of the Bessie Award Committee. Presently, Byrd-McPhee continues her 20-year tenure as executive director for Ladies of Hip-Hop and artistic director of LDC (LOHH Dance Collective).
“Black Dancing Bodies” (BDB) was launched by Byrd-McPhee in 2018 as an initiative to uplift and celebrate Black women in street and club dance culture. BDB is an ongoing street and club dance project addressing the erasure, miscoding, and often intentional exclusion of Black women’s work and voices. BDB has embarked on the journey to collect, preserve and tell the stories of these women through dance works, interviews and photo documentation.