Melanye White Dixon, associate professor, Department of Dance, received the 2015 International Association of Blacks in Dance (IABD) Educator/Scholar Award at the 27th annual IABD conference and festival in Cleveland on Saturday Jan. 24. She was honored for her contributions to dance through her teaching and mentoring in higher education. The award was presented by Dixon's mentor, dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild.

Dixon began her professional dance preparation at the Dance Theatre of Harlem and as a merit scholarship recipient at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. She is an accomplished performer and served as a choreographer, performer and master teacher for the International Festival of Dance Academies at the Hong Kong Academy for the Performing Arts in Wan Chai, China. Dixon has served on the boards of directors for American Dance Guild, OhioDance and as a cultural competence consultant for the Ohio State Board of Education.

She was the first African-American to earn her doctoral degree in dance at Temple University, and the first African-American female faculty member to be hired by the Ohio State College of the Arts in 1986. She also was the first black faculty member in the Department of Dance. 

Dixon is author of Marion Cuyjet and Her Judimar School of Dance: Training Ballerinas in Black Philadelphia (2011). She is coordinator of dance education at Ohio State and teaches courses in dance pedagogy and dance history.

Photo: Dixon (second from left) with Gottschild and Ohio State dance majors Ca'la Henderson and Kimberly Issacs