In 1983 Ava LaVonne Vinesett began a professional dance career as one of the founding members of the Chuck Davis African-American Dance Ensemble. During her tenure with Chuck Davis, Ava served as a principal dancer, Assistant Artistic Director and Educational Coordinator for the troupe. With a methodical approach, Ava studies the cultural origins and thus the continuous evolution of dances of Africa. She uses the term “dance translator” to describe her scholarship on the process of communicating existing legacies of danced religious, spiritual and cultural beliefs from one cultural group to another. Performance credits include world premieres by Donald McKayle, Ron K. Brown, Assane Konte, Titos Sompa, Abdel Salaam, and Nafissa Shariff. Ava serves as an assessor and dance consultant for several organizations, and is the founder of Artistic Visions of Axé, a research focused coalition committed to invoking cultural understanding through dance. She recently completed a six-month study in Salvador da Bahia, Brasil researching the dances associated with Candomblé. As a Patricia Roberts Harris fellow, she received her MFA in dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Ava LaVonne Vinesett, Asst. Professor of the Practice of Dance and the 2002 recipient of the Duke University Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award, is on faculty at Duke University, Durham, N.C. where she instructs studio and lecture courses, and is the founder and director of the Duke African Repertory Ensemble.