Movement in Conversation: An Evening with Carole Y Johnson and Dr. Alex Carter

Dance Activist, Administrator, Teacher, Writer

Carole Y Johnson, a dance activist, performer, administrator, teacher, and writer, is a Juilliard graduate and now Artistic Director Emeritus of Australia’s NAISDA Dance College and Founder of Bangarra Dance Theatre. She used dance to build a contemporary cultural presence of African Americans in the USA and then First Nations peoples in Australia. In the USA she is responsible for dance initiatives in the 1960s and 70s notably: the Association of Black Choreographers (ABC), NYC’s Dancemobile; FEET Dance and Theatre magazine, and the First National Congress of Blacks in Dance, projects of MODE (Modern Organization of Dance Evolvement.

Johnson a principal dancer with the Eleo Pomare Dance Company arrived in Australia in 1972 at a time of political ferment. She started the first Indigenous modern dance workshop that presented a dance of protest at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy Demonstration in Canberra. Returning to Australia in 1975 she began workshop processes that fused contemporary dance with Aboriginal traditional dance and carried forward the vision of building the National Aboriginal/Islander Skills Development Association, a dance educational institution known as NAISDA Dance College and established Bangarra Dance Theatre in 1989.

Upper School Dean, Poly Prep Country Day School

Dr. Alex Carter is an Upper School Dean at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated with honors in Political Science from Alabama State University in 2004. He received his Ph.D. in Afro-American Studies in 2021 from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2013, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship as a Visiting Scholar at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where he completed research on his dissertation “Afro-Aboriginal Encounters: Black Arts and the Global Politics of Black Power.” He also received the Joyce Avrech Berkman Endowed Fund for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship at UMass Amherst for his essay “‘UNITE TO FIGHT’: Koori-Bina, Afro-Aboriginal Solidarity, and Aboriginal Feminist Visions in the 1970s.” He has designed a curriculum about African-American history and culture during his tenure.