Ninoska M’bewe Escobar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance, where she was previously an Inclusive Excellence Fellow in Dance. She is an alumna of the Performance as Public Practice program at The University of Texas at Austin and her research and teaching centers the contributions of Black diasporic and artists of color to American arts, history and social politics. Her book project examines the work and legacy of the Caribbean-American choreographer-anthropologist-social activist Pearl Primus (1919-1994). Most recently, she examined the reemergence of the rarely seen work Michael Row The Boat Ashore (1979), created by Primus in response to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Her essay on this work appears in The Journal of American Culture special issue Dance and the Black Body (Summer 2023).

In 2023 she directed Roots and Routes, a public program of dance films, community dance classes and artist talks in collaboration with the Elizabeth Waters Center for Dance at The University of New Mexico, the City of Albuquerque Department of Arts and Culture, Albuquerque Main Library, Keshet Center for the Arts and Studio Sway. She was a Consortium for Faculty Diversity Scholar in Theatre Arts and African American Studies at Amherst College, where she convened the symposium African American Dance: Form, Function and Style! to focus attention on the history and contributions of Black diasporic dancers and choreographers to American dance, and was a Lecturer in Dance at Smith College and Visiting Artist in Dance at Mt. Holyoke College. She is a former faculty and administrator at The Ailey School and Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation in New York, where she co-directed the Pre-Professional Performing Arts School Program and directed AileyCamp in New York and Miami, as well as a former lead national facilitator of the Ailey organization’s humanities curriculum Revelations: An Interdisciplinary Approach.

Dr. Escobar has a professional background as a performer and choreographer. She trained at The Clark Center for the Performing Arts and Alvin Ailey American Dance Center in New York. She was a principal dancer in the companies of legendary Brazilian capoeiristas Loremil Machado and Jelon Vieira, Newark Dance Theatre, and the Caribbean American Dance Company, among others, and performed with Nigerian Jùjú music trailblazer King Sunny Adé, with Le Ballet National Djoliba, and with Jamaican reggae superstars Third World during their 1980s tours of the U.S. She performed in the original cast of Fame (1980), in the Brooklyn Academy of Music production of Njinga The Queen King (1993), and in numerous concert stage productions and venues including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Jacob’s Pillow, and the Santa Fe Dance Festival. She created the dances for Reza Abdoh’s The Law of Remains (1992) and the Nuyorican Poets Café production of Pepe Carril’s Shango de Ima (1994), which won an Audelco award for Outstanding Black Theater Choreography. As a director, she created original works performed at the Joyce Soho, the Theater of the Riverside Church, the Neuberger Museum of Art, and The Knitting Factory in New York, among others.