Born: 8 October, year unknown (circa 1970), United States (assumed)
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Theresa Ruth Howard was in her mid-40s when she launched “Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet” (MoBBallet), which “preserves, presents, and promotes the contributions and stories of Black artists in the field of Ballet, illustrating that they are an integral part of dance history at large,” in 2015. Howard began her professional dance career at 12 with the Philadelphia Civic Ballet Company and was one of few dancers of color in most settings. “It’s not just an arabesque, it’s not just a pirouette,” she later said. “You’re the Black girl doing the arabesque, you’re the Black girl doing the pirouette. Which says that either Black people can do this, and they’re capable, or they’re not. That’s something white dancers, white students, don’t carry with them.” While that fact didn’t change, her environment did after high school, when she joined the groundbreaking Dance Theatre of Harlem, whose artistic director Virginia Johnson calls her “a force for change,” saying, “She’s done her research, she knows her methods, and she is relentless in not letting people off the hook. And that’s what’s needed.”
Howard also works with companies and other organizations as a diversity strategist and consultant and has been a vocal proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement. Her MoBBallet symposia encompass conversations and lectures that include discussion of contemporary activism, and its intersection with dance institutions. She was a consultant for the three-year Equity Project, which involved directors from 21 ballet organizations from North America and “focused on bringing African-Americans to the field of ballet in all aspects—onstage and behind the stage, in the wings, in the administrative offices, in the schools.”
As an educator, she has been a faculty member with The Ailey School’s Ballet and the Joffrey Ballet School and has taught at a range of universities both in the United States and internationally. She describes her personal philosophy as, “The only way to make this world a better place is to be better people in it.”