MICHELE BYRD-MCPHEE

A 2023 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Service to the Field, Michele Byrd-Mcphee is a street dancer, an arts activist, and a tireless advocate for girls and women who has been working for decades to re-contextualize spaces and conversations about Hip-Hop culture along gender, sex, cultural, socio-historical and racial lines. Her work situates Black dance forms, theories, dance techniques, and the value of the lived artistic experience in spaces that honor and acknowledge cultural roots along with the many creative pioneers who have shaped them. This is especially important given the ways in which Black dance has been co-opted, appropriated without acknowledgement to its cultural origins.

Most recently, in partnership with SNIPES USA, Michele opened New York’s only woman-led, woman-owned, and women-focused street dance & arts space. With the LOHH x SNIPES partnership, Byrd-McPhee is literally and figuratively flipping the dance world on its head! Historically, there has been a hierarchy in dance where ballet and forms derived from ballet are atop the global "ladder of dance"; receiving priority in resources, access, and in what and who is presented and taught; this space is dedicated to street dance forms and organizations. In this space, we have been able to present events and provide rehearsal space and classes for communities that are normally forgotten and systematically excluded from traditional dance spaces.

Presently, Byrd-McPhee continues her 20-year commitment as Executive Director to Ladies of Hip-Hop and artistic director of LDC (LOHH Dance Collective).