Dr. Imani Kai Johnson is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the Africanist aesthetics, Hip Hop streetdance cultures and practices, oral history and ethnography, and structures of power. She was raised in Northern California and attended undergrad at UC Berkeley, majoring in Economics and English. She has a Master’s degree at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study – where she focused on African American and Afro-Caribbean History and Literature – and completed her doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. During a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU’s Performance Studies Department, she founded and hosted two Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conferences (S&P), which are dedicated to nurturing a platform for transdisciplinary exchanges that shape the future of Hip Hop Studies. Beginning at UCR in 2014 in the Dance Department, she subsequently hosted two more S&Ps.
Dr. Johnson joins DBS as an Associate Professor and is currently Vice Chair of Dance. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies (2023), and the author of Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (OUP 2023), which explores the unseen or invisiblized Africanist aesthetics embedded in the ritual dance circle (called the cypher) that is essential to global Hip Hop.
Office: ARTS 206
