Williams, Ann Marie (Annie Marie Ferrell)

Impact on the world

Founded the Dallas Black Dance Academy in 1974 specifically to provide dance instruction to underprivileged students unable to afford private training, expanding it into the Dallas Black Dance Theatre in 1976, which grew under her leadership into the fourth-largest African American dance troupe in the United States and the oldest continuously operating professional dance company in Dallas; the company performed at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and Williams, who studied in New York directly under Arthur Mitchell, already profiled in this collection, alongside Martha Graham and Alvin Ailey, served as the organization's primary creative director until 2014.

Life & background

Born Annie Marie Ferrell in Coolidge, Texas in 1937, Williams was first introduced to dance and the local arts community at Lincoln High School in Dallas before earning a bachelor's degree in dance from Prairie View A&M University and becoming the first African American woman to earn a Master of Fine Arts from Texas Woman's University. She traveled to New York to study under Arthur Mitchell and received additional training from Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Alvin Ailey, before returning to Dallas to teach for the city's independent school district; a $1 million Ford Foundation grant in 1968 allowed her to establish the first dance department at Bishop College in Dallas. In 1974 she founded the Dallas Black Dance Academy to serve students who could not afford private dance instruction, and by 1976 had grown the program into the Dallas Black Dance Theatre, which she led as primary creative director for nearly four decades, building a second company, DBDT: Encore!, and youth ensembles to feed dancers into the professional ranks while the main company toured internationally and performed at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. A serious 1986 car accident, in which she was struck by another vehicle after stopping for gas on a highway entrance ramp and suffered two broken legs, hospitalized both her and, temporarily, the company itself, though both recovered; she stepped down as artistic director in 2014 after 37 years, was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame in 2002, and received the Texas Medal of Arts in 2017, continuing to serve on the company's board of directors and numerous other regional arts boards.

Sources

1. Art&Seek/KERA; PaperCity Magazine; Dallas Black Dance Theatre