Ismay Andrews

Ismay Andrews was an American stage actress and dance educator recognized as one of the earliest major teachers of African dance in the United States. Her Broadway career spanned from 1929 to 1934, after which she devoted the following decades to teaching African dance in New York City community centers.

Andrews launched her performing career in New York in 1929 with the musical comedy Great Day, staged at the Cosmopolitan Theatre. She returned to Broadway in 1932 with the play Ol' Man Satan, and in 1934 appeared in the operetta Africana. That same year, 1932, she appeared in the film The Black King.

During the early 1930s, Andrews studied dance under Asadata Dafora, a figure central to building awareness of African humanity and cultural traditions at a time when prevailing attitudes in the United States characterized Africans as savage and animalistic. This growing interest in African music and dance offered a new positive Black identity rooted in pre-colonial traditions, a cultural current connected to both the Harlem Renaissance and the Négritude movement.

Andrews began teaching African dance at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1934, placing her among the earliest major teachers of the form in the country, alongside Efiom Odok and Dafora. She also taught at Mother African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which served as a primary center of African American culture in New York City. Her teaching continued across New York community centers until 1959. Among her students were Chief Bey, Pearl Primus, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, Alice Dinizulu, Alexandreena Dixon, Eartha Kitt, Eleo Pomare, actress Bea Richards, and Brunilda Ruiz. Andrews developed her knowledge of African traditions not through travel to the continent but through research conducted in public libraries.

In the 1940s, Andrews concentrated on the dances of East Africa and founded a performing ensemble called the Swa-Hili Dancers, which she also directed. The company presented reconstructed East African dances on stage at the Stage Door Canteen, in cabarets, and for the USO during World War II. The African American community in Harlem supported her cultural work throughout her career.

In May 1971, the Modern Organization for Dance Evolvement, founded by Carole Johnson and others in New York, presented Andrews with their inaugural dance award, honoring a person who had contributed to the Black experience in dance. Andrews died in poverty in New York City.