Juanita Boisseau

Juanita Boisseau (July 22, 1911 – May 22, 2012), also known as Juanita Boisseau Ramseur, was an American dancer whose career spanned from the late 1920s through the 1980s. She is recognized as one of the last surviving performers associated with the Cotton Club in New York.

Boisseau demonstrated an early aptitude for dance, winning her first dance contest at age nine performing the Charleston. Her professional career began on Broadway, where she appeared as a chorus girl in the musical revue Black Birds of 1928. In 1931 she performed in the Broadway musical revue Fast and Furious. Her verified Broadway credits include Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1939, in which she performed as a dancing chorus member at the Hudson Theatre. That same year she was rated among the most proficient chorus girls in the country.

During the early 1930s, Boisseau became a regular performer at the Cotton Club, a New York nightclub that operated from 1923 to 1940 and featured prominent African American jazz musicians and entertainers throughout the Prohibition era. She shared the stage there with Ethel Waters, the Nicholas Brothers, Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, and Lena Horne. Around 1935 she traveled to France alongside other African American entertainers of the period, where she gained recognition during Paris's Jazz Age. Upon returning to Harlem, she joined the chorus line at the Apollo Theatre, working alongside singer George Dewey Washington. She was one of sixteen dancers who comprised the Apollo chorus line, regarded at the time as the finest female dancers in New York. Fellow chorus members during the 1930s included Ristina Banks, Carol Carter, Marion Evelyn Edwards, Elaine Ellis, Myrtle Hawkings, Temy Fletcher, and Cleo Hayes.

In 1943 Boisseau appeared in the film Stormy Weather and that same year performed choreography at the Hollywood Club in Hollywood, California. In the early 1980s she served as a consultant for the film The Cotton Club, though she, along with many other former Cotton Club performers, criticized the production for its emphasis on violence and gangsters rather than the club's history and chorus line. In 1984 she appeared in the cabaret production Shades of Harlem, a show recreating the Cotton Club era of the 1920s, in which she performed as one of three Renaissance Ladies alongside two other former Cotton Club dancers. In 2002 she was the subject of the documentary Cotton Club Girl, which drew on her memories of performing at the Cotton Club in the 1930s with Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

Boisseau was married to Frederick D. Ramseur, who died in 2000. Her son, Sterling Bough, is a dancer, singer, actor, and choreographer. She died in New York on May 22, 2012, at the age of 100, and is buried at Calverton Cemetery in Calverton, New York.