BIO

E. MONCELL DURDEN

is a dance educator, choreographer, ethnographer, embodied historian, and ethnocorporealogist whose work bridges performance, scholarship, and cultural memory. He serves as Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Southern California’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, where his teaching and research center on what he terms the morphology of Afro-kinetic memory—the study of how cultural identity, rhythm, and historical knowledge are retained, transmitted, and transformed through the body. Durden specializes in both practical and theoretical pedagogies that situate movement within cultural, historical, and sociopolitical frameworks. A highly sought-after instructor in the United States and abroad, he is an expert in locking, house, hip hop, authentic jazz, and Black American social party dances from 1900 to the present. His approach integrates anthropology, musicology, neuropsychology, and philosophy to articulate dance as both aesthetic practice and epistemological system.

As an ethnocorporealogist—a scholar of embodied cultural transmission—Durden advances an original research framework known as AFRO, a methodology grounded in Africanist aesthetic principles, ethnocorporeology, and embodied inquiry. AFRO positions the dancing body as archive, analytic instrument, and site of theoretical production. His work challenges dominant historiographies by centering Afro-diasporic movement practices as foundational to American cultural formation.

Durden is an alumnus of Rennie Harris Puremovement, the Philadelphia-based hip hop theater company. Prior to joining USC Kaufman, he taught for seven years at Drexel University and has held appointments at Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, and Bennington College. He has contributed scholarship to Jazz Dance: A History of the Roots and Branches, Rooted Jazz Dance: Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century, and The SAGE Encyclopedia of African Cultural Heritage in North America, and is a contributor to The Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Dance Studies. His documentary, Everything Remains Raw: A Historical Perspective on Hip Hop Dance, was invited by the U.S. Embassy in Vladivostok, Russia for screening at its 2013 film festival.

In 2010, Durden founded INTANGIBLE ROOTS, an organization dedicated to the preservation, pedagogy, and scholarly examination of Afro-diasporic social dance traditions.