Charlottean Tamara Williams earns dance fellowship

B.T. TWITTY

Tamara Williams of Charlotte is one of 25 creatives to earn a national fellowship from  Dance/USA.

A Charlotte dancer has earned a national fellowship.

Tamara Williams is one of 25 fellows in Dance/USA’s Fellowships to Artists program, the national service organization’s initiative to support dance and movement-based artists from across the U.S. and its territories. 

Williams, a choreographer and founder of Moving Spirits Inc., has presented choreography internationally in Africa, Europe, South America and the Caribbean. She’s been published in several dance journals and her book “Giving Life to Movement” was published by McFarland & Co. in 2021; and her manuscript, The African Diaspora and Civic Responsibility, was published this year.

Williams, who earned the 2025 Gantt Center’s Black Artist residency, was commissioned by Kaatsbaan International Dance Center to create a new work for “Moving Spirits” and received multiple grants from the Arts & Science Council, including support for free African diaspora dance workshops in Charlotte and the annual African-Brazilian Lavagem Festival.

She was awarded the 2019-20 UNC Charlotte Board of Governors Teaching Award, a 2020 commission from the National Center for Choreography, and 2021 ASC Emerging Creative Fellowship. In 2022, Williams received the North Carolina Dance Festival’s Jan Van Dyke Legacy Award.

In 2024, Williams launched the first bi-annual International African Diaspora Dance Traditions Conference in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, which included scholars and artists from around the world. She co-created the Benin Movement Research and Exchange in Cotonou and Ouidah, Benin, in 2023, which focused on African diaspora dance and music with Beninese traditions. 

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