Moncell Durden(I)
- Director
A highly qualified and experienced dance educator and embodied historian. Moncell is an Assistant professor of
practices at Univeristy of Southern California Glorya Kaufman International School of Dance., specializing in
pedagogical practices that provide a cultural/historical context in Afro-diasporic spiritual and social dance
formations Moncell has consumed volumes of scholarly and popular literature in relation to African-American
vernacular dance forms, in particular, and general dance studies. Moncell retained a 7-year adjunct professor
position at Drexel University until he was accepted into an MA program in 2010 at Roehampton University in the
UK, before Drexel Moncell held an appointment as senior lecturer of Hip-Hop at University of the Arts in
Philadelphia. Moncell served two years on faculty at Yale (School of Drama) teaching the MFA students, spent five
(5) years teaching Wesleyan University in Connecticut and one semester at Bennington College in Vermont. Guest
residencies, lectures, and classes include CU Irvine, UCLA, Princeton, MCCC, Bucknell University, University of
Bogota, and University of Buffalo.
Moncell's latest work Beginning Hip Hop Dance is an Interactive Dance Series published by Human Kinetics.
Currently he is writing his book Beyond the Circle: The Move-Meant, the Music and the People. Developing an
on-line hip hop course for NDEO, and searching for a producer for his documentary on the genealogy African
American Dance. The founder of Intangible Roots - a series of virtual lectures that reveal the deep-rooted structures of African retentions and characteristics of behavior that are not bound by time and geography.
