New Dance Faculty

A 2023 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Service to the Field, Michele Byrd-McPhee is the founder of Ladies of Hip-Hop (LOHH), a street dancer, arts activist, and advocate for women. For decades, she has worked to reframe Hip-Hop culture through the lens of gender, race, and cultural identity. Her work centers Black and Brown dance forms, honoring their cultural roots and the creative pioneers who shaped them. In doing so, she confronts the systemic appropriation and erasure of Black dance.

In 2020, Byrd-McPhee was awarded the Integrated Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she created and taught “Hip-Hop, Women, and the World.” She has served as a grant panelist for the McKnight Foundation and DanceNYC and was a voting member of the Bessie Award Committee.

In partnership with SNIPES USA, she opened New York’s first women-led street dance and arts space. Dedicated to street dance forms, it offers rehearsal space, classes, and events for communities often excluded from traditional dance settings.

One of her greatest honors was being immortalized in a mural in North Philadelphia celebrating Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary. Created by artists Christian “TAME ARTZ” Rodriguez and Bill Strobel, the mural pays tribute to Hip-Hop’s legacy and cultural impact.

Currently a 2024-2025 Center for Ballet and the Arts research scholar, Byrd-McPhee is expanding her Black Dancing Bodies Project. This initiative uplifts Black women in street and club dance, preserving their stories through performance, interviews, and documentation. Alongside this work, she continues as Executive Director of Ladies of Hip-Hop and Artistic Director of the LOHH Dance Collective.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Neri holds an MFA in dance with a minor in film from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is a PhD candidate at the University of West Indies. She also studied at Instituto Superior de Artes and Escuela Nacional de Instructores de Artes in, Havana. Neri is the founder and artistic director of IFE-ILE Afro-Cuban Dance Company, based in Miami, which repertoire combines traditional and contemporary fusion dance works. The company founded in 1996 has performed worldwide in tours, commercials and films, and also produces the IFE-ILE Afro-Cuban Dance Festival every summer in Miami, FL, since its creation in 1998. The festival contains an academic conference component that attracts local and international participants and renowned scholars among them the late Dr. Katherine Dunham in 2004. During her career, spanning over twenty years, Neri has worked on numerous international tours, movies, television and theatrical productions with renowned artists. She choreographed Estefan’s Grammy award-winning video "No me Dejes de Querer" and actor Andy Garcia’s directorial debut movie "The Lost City." Currently, Neri is completing a doctorate in Cultural Studies at the University of West Indies. Her research focuses on dance and migration, cultural appropriation, multimedia performances and hybridization in popular culture. 

Angelica Monteiro is a storyteller, movement artist, and educator from the Brazilian Amazon. Her art comes from the complexity of growing up between the rainforest and the urban landscape while crossing continental borders. She combines movements from the umbrella of street dances, Amazonian traditions, visionary fiction, and poetry to create her embodied storytelling methodology. Angelica is passionate about building bridges instead of borders which is visible through her works such as A Riverside Tale, and Under the Same Roof, both collaborations between Amazonian and US artists. She has an anthropological approach to dance that creates pathways for fierce embodied research, anti-colonial communication, and scientific reasoning in the performing arts world. Please keep an eye out for course offerings from Angelica for next Fall semester. 

A lifelong practitioner of West African Dance, Mustapha Braimah has over two decades of international experience and artistic acclaim in his various roles as an artist-scholar from Ghana, West Africa. His artistic practice and making are deeply rooted in contemporary, popular, and traditional forms. He is a choreographer, educator, curator, performer, musician, and administrator, and he will provide primary source understanding of African Diasporic dance and music as well as cultural context in all courses he teaches. Further, he will contribute rigorous dancer development through his technique and repertory courses. Mustapha’s scholarship includes work to make visible the traditional West African Forms that are disappearing. This Fall, he will be teaching Introduction to West African Dance (Dance 112), Dance History (Dance 171GC), and Repertory (Dance 305CR).

Originally from Cambridge MA, Ramon Baynes began his training in gymnastics and dance at the age of ten. Receiving a full scholarship to the prestigious Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Ramon studied ballet and modern dance. He went on to train at Steps On Broadway and Broadway Dance Center, where he met the unparalleled Rhapsody James and became a company member of Rhapsody the Company.

Ramon’s big break occurred in 2001 when he was cast in the iconic music video, “I’m a Slave for You,” choreographed and directed by Brian Friedman and Wade Robson. He then performed with Britney for the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards at the historical Lincoln Center. Ramon performed in Janet Jackson’s “State of the World Tour” alongside her prior tour dancers dating back to Janet’s 1990 “Rhythm Nation World Tour.“ He was also a featured dancer in Beyoncé’s “Freakum Dress” in addition to the recent hit single “Find Your Way Back” which was included in the influential visual movie “Black is King”, as well as Disney’s remake of the film “The Lion King.”

As head choreographer/co-artistic director for the diverse visionary, FKA Twigs, Ramon helped launch a private event, “ROOMS,” inspired by the Zodiac signs. Set in the heart of London, the show incorporated live performance, art, and fashion by designers and architects from around the world. Following the success of “ROOMS,” Ramon went on to choreograph  FKA Twig’s US and European tours including the Made In America Festival founded by Jay-Z.