Imani Kai Johnson

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 is currently Vice Chair of Critical Dance Studies and an Associate Professor in the Department of Black Study at UC Riverside. She is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Hip Hop Dance Studies (2023) (with Mary Fogarty), and the author of Dark Matter in Breaking Cyphers: the Life of Africanist Aesthetics in Global Hip Hop (OUP 2023). Dr. Johnson also founded and chairs the Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference Series, a conference dedicated to nurturing a platform for an intellectual community that shapes the direction of Hip Hop studies to come.