Movers & Shapers: Eva Yaa Asantewaa

For over four decades, Eva Yaa Asantewaa has worked as a freelance arts writer, specializing in dance and performance. A 1974 graduate of Fordham University (Rose Hill), Ms. Yaa Asantewaa has contributed writing on dance to print and online publications such as Dance Magazine, The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, Gay City News, The Dance Enthusiast and Time Out New York since 1976. She served as a member of the New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards committee for three years and as a consultant or panelist for numerous arts funding, awards or presenting organizations, including the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In 2007, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa founded her arts blog InfiniteBody, a resource for news, commentary and criticism especially trusted by the dance community.  With students from the annual Writing on Dance workshop series she taught for several years at Dance Theater Workshop/New York Live Arts, she created Dancer’s Turn, a blog devoted to longform profiles of dance artists. She has also interviewed dance artists and advocates as host of Body and Soul podcast and will launch a new dance interview podcast, Serious Moonlight, this fall.  As a WBAI radio broadcaster (1987-89), Ms. Yaa Asantewaa worked with the Women’s Radio Collective and the Gay and Lesbian Independent Broadcasters Collective (producers of OUTLOOKS) and co-hosted the Tuesday Afternoon Arts Magazine with Jennifer Bernet as well as producing her own specials. She is also a published poet and has read her work at numerous venues including the Brooklyn Museum, the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, A Different Light Bookstore, Bowery Poetry Club and Cornelia Street Cafe.

Beginning in the 1990s, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa created, produced and facilitated workshops and special events sponsored by over sixty arts, health and social service, spiritual, feminist, people of color, and GLBTQ organizations in the New York metropolitan area. Among these are Gibney Dance Center, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New York University Tisch School of the Arts Dance Program, Hunter College Dance Program, Queensborough Community College, the New York Open Center’s Womanspirit Journey program, New York Theosophical Society, College of New Rochelle, Healing Works, New York State Conference on Women’s Health, Riverside Church Wellness Center, Women’s Health Education Project and the Women’s Rites Center.

A native New Yorker of Afro-Caribbean heritage, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa lives in the East Village.

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