“Reconnecting with the tenants of African dance serves all dance and all people.”
— Baba Stafford C. Berry, Jr.
Stafford C. Berry, Jr. (Baba Stafford), M.F.A., is an accomplished artist, educator, activist, and scholar of African-rooted dance, theatre, and aesthetics with an extensive background in arts and education. Baba Stafford is the Director of the legendary African American Dance Company at Indiana University Bloomington, and he is Professor of Practice in the departments of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Contemporary Dance. He has studied performing arts in the U.S.and in Guinea, West Africa, and he has toured nationally in the U.S., and internationally to Europe and the Caribbean. He is a certified teacher of the Umfundalai contemporary African dance technique and a licensed Zumba® Instructor.
Baba Stafford was Associate Artistic Director of Baba Chuck Davis’ internationally-acclaimed African American Dance Ensemble (AADE) in Durham, NC, for 14 years; Assistant to the Choreographer of Kariamu & Company: Traditions in Philadelphia, PA, for five years; and former faculty at the American Dance Festival for five years. He served on National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), North Carolina and Durham Arts Council dance panels, and on boards for the North Carolina Dance Alliance and Ohio Dance. In addition, he’s taught at several institutions in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio.
“My work is concerned with African traditions and their uses for contemporary aesthetics, contemporary times, and the current functional needs of marginalized people—both in physical activity and in philosophical thought.”
— Baba Stafford C. Berry, Jr.
Baba Stafford’s artistic efforts are concerned with creating embodied epistemologies for contemporary African and African American culture while ‘holding space’ for the works and identities of various Black, LGBTQIA+, and other disempowered, yet powerful communities. For several years, he co-directed The Berry & Nance Dance Project (BNDP), an all-male contemporary African dance company which foregrounded North American Black male discourse. In addition to his work with AADE and BNDP, Baba Stafford has choreographed dances and musicals for many universities and professional companies. “Wawa Aba” (2012) and “Double-Dutch & Broken Levees” (2017), two of his contemporary African works, are included in the repertory of the world-class Dayton Contemporary Dance Company.
Baba Stafford partnered with Short North Stage for the award-winning Columbus August Wilson Festival. He co-directed August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson with colleague Cheryl McFerrin at Denison University and at the Garden Theatre, and he choreographed “Who I Be!”, a commissioned Wilson-inspired evening length dance. Both works were honored for Outstanding Achievement in Theater at the 23rd annual Central Ohio Theatre Critics Award in 2017. The Mayor of Cincinnati, OH, proclaimed October 5th as “Stafford C. Berry, Jr. Day” in recognition of his work in arts education and performance throughout the city as the coveted Taft Museum of Art’s 2017 Duncanson Artist in Residence recipient.
Baba Stafford has made several works and has received dancemaking grants from locales in Indiana and the city of Bloomington, Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia, North Carolina and the city of Durham, and Ohio and the cities of Cincinnati and Columbus. He was awarded the 2021 IU Global Popular Music Team Research Grant funded by the Mellon Foundation for embodied research on two dances from the southern region of Africa, culminating in “Shosholoza Train: A Performance of Embodied Research” made accessible to the community at Switchyard Park in Bloomington, Indiana.
As faculty at Indiana University (IU) since 2017, Baba Stafford has made significant and positive impacts in the areas of dancemaking, education, research, performance, and community engagement. He choreographed works for all of IU’s official dance programs—a first for any faculty person—including IU Contemporary Dance, IU RedSteppers, Jacobs School of Music Ballet Theater, and the legendary African American Dance Company. He teaches a diverse range of courses including Dancemaking, Dance Practices, Contemporary Dance Theater, Black Dance History, Dance in the African Diaspora, and the African American Dance Company (AADC) which is a course offered through IU’s Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies since 1974.
As director of AADC, Baba Stafford produces nearly 25 engagements each year ranging from community showings, lecture demonstrations, and workshops to world-class productions and national tours that have promoted and propelled Black dance, history, and culture. Funded by the Bloomington Arts Commission in 2019, he presented Kuadhimisha: A Black Culture Celebration at Peoples Park commemorating the site of Bloomington’s Black Market that was firebombed by the KKK in 1968. In 2018, Baba Stafford’s “Good Game, Yo!” was selected for the American Dance Guild Festival at the Ailey Citigroup Theater in New York City, performed by AADC and IU Contemporary Dance students. Since 2017, he produces the annual KUKUSANYA International Africanist Dance Intensive featuring esteemed guest dance artists and musicians, masterclasses, panel discussions, and performances exposing the community to diverse dance forms and perspectives of the African diaspora. Baba Stafford is leading the legendary AADC into its 50th season and anniversary year, a significant milestone in Black history at IU and beyond.
In addition to teaching courses in both African American and African Diaspora Studies and Contemporary Dance, Baba Stafford is affiliate faculty in the Department of African Studies and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. In 2020, he received the IU LGBTQ+ Culture Center Spirit Award in recognition of his advocacy work for queer communities. He also served as director of IU’s Atkins Living Learning Center, fostering first-year students’ academic excellence through the study and expression of African American history and culture.