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 Dance and 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), winner of the 2024 de la Torre Bueno Book Award by Dance Studies Association. Dr. Johnson also founded and chairs the Show & Prove Hip Hop Studies Conference Series, a platform dedicated to nurturing an intellectual community that shapes the direction of Hip Hop studies to come.

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