Urban Bush Women

Urban Bush Women combines revolutionary performance, deep-healing community engagement, and ancestral knowledge from the African diaspora into a cultural force that is urgent, forward-looking, and essential.
For the last four decades, UBW has defied expectations and easy categorization with its bold, narrative storytelling. The very bodies of the seven founding members of UBW – Black women of various shapes and sizes – challenged and changed the landscape of who could be seen on stage as a dancer. The subject matter of the work placed the stories of such women, historically overlooked and undervalued in America, front and center stage. Similarly, UBW remains committed to ensuring that underserved audiences, especially people of color who face systemic barriers to accessing conventional performance, are engaged, invited, and made welcome wherever the company tours.

UBW embraces the power of radical storytelling to activate social change. Whether creating genre-defying work for the stage, guiding the development of Black Women+ choreographers and producers, organizing for justice through art-making, or inspiring leaders across generations, UBW is an innovator, operating at the vanguard.