Momar Ndiaye is a dance artist, videographer, activist, and actor of social-cultural development from Senegal with thirty years of experience—making, performing, teaching, collaborating, and developing initiatives for a sustainable creative industry in West-Africa. He has an established international profile as a choreographer and has danced in the international Company Premier Temp as well as other significant choreographers. He created his Company Cadanses in 2004 to support the promotion of African creativity through mentorship, training, and production. Since 2016, he has been a collaborating dramaturge and artistic coach for the award-winning dance company Abby Z and the New Utility. And more recently has served as faculty at the highly acclaimed American Dance Festival, a leading summer intensive training center for contemporary dance, teaching in their Pre-Professional and Professional programs, and co-directing their International Choreographers in Residence program. 

Ndiaye received his MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017. His prior areas of academic studies and professional activity include a broad-based education in economics, management, marketing, and environmental studies / sustainability advocacy. Currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance within the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University, Ndiaye’s position is partially funded by The Global Arts and Humanity Discovery Theme. As a researcher, Ndiaye is deeply invested in questions of cultural identity and cultural hybridization in the frame of globalization and interculturalism, as they signal a passive colonial continuity, as well as the concept of Négritude and its side effects. His research and teaching are in conversation with the complexities of his existence as an African immigrant who was born and raised in a “former colony of France.” His goal is to foster an inclusive environment for all dance students and continue to actively decenter Western forms as the unspoken neutral cultural canon to which most institutions default.