Studio Stories: Reminiscing on Twin Cities Dance with Deneane Richburg - Season 11, Episode 136

Deneane Richburg (Choreographer, Dancer, former Competitive
Figure
Skater, Founder/Artistic Director of Brownbody) grew up a
competitive figure
skater—in spaces where she had to check her blackness at the
door, as world
skating was dominated by whiteness and rooted in values that
subjugated her
ancestry’s truths; to quote Zora Neale Hurston, she always felt
“most colored
when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” Richburg
realized
the need to carve out space for her ancestral history hence her
decision to
establish Brownbody.
Since 2013 Brownbody has honored complex narratives of U.S.-based
Black
communities by disrupting assumptions, and disenfranchising
ideologies,
around blackness. She received her MFA in dance and choreography
from
Temple University in 2007, an MA in Afro-American Studies from
UW
Madison, and a BA in English and African American Studies from
Carleton
College. Richburg has been choreographing work for both the stage
and ice
since 2007 most recently completing an evening-length work called
“Tracing
Sacred Steps” which brings ring shout onto the ice. Deneane was a
recipient
of a 2017 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, a 2019 Jerome Hill
Artist
Fellowship, and a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists made possible
with
generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.