Biographical Note
Judith Lynne Hanna was born September 21, 1936, in St. Louis, Missouri. Hanna earned her doctorate in anthropology from Columbia University in 1976, preceded by two separate master's degrees in anthropology from Columbia University in 1975 and political science from Michigan State in 1962 respectively. In 1963, Hanna and her husband, William John Hanna, traveled to Africa under a Michigan State University-Ford Foundation Grant, where they conducted field research in Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda. This fieldwork resulted in her 1979 book To Dance is Human. In addition to many writings and varied contributions to the arts and anthropology, she has taught African dance and offered workshops to administrators, teachers, and students in schools and community centers around the U.S. and abroad. Hanna's written and artistic contributions encompass a wide range of topics from the relationships between dance and society in different cultures and communities, to aggression in the schools and how it relates to class, race, and culture. She most recently has been serving as senior research scholar in the Department of Dance and a senior research scientist in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park.