Associate Professor Nyama McCarthy-Brown is one of three arts and humanities faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences to be selected for the 2023 Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Awards. The Ratner Awards recognize faculty who demonstrate creative teaching and extraordinary records of engaging, motivating and inspiring students. Each Ratner Award winner receives a $10,000 cash prize, as well as a $15,000 teaching account to fund future projects.

Dr. McCarthy-Brown, now the fifth faculty member in the Department of Dance to win a Ratner Award, aims to grow and strengthen connections between Ohio State and students in Ghana. By bringing dance education students to the University of Ghana to learn the Agbekor dance, McCarthy-Brown will create a sequential dance curriculum that will further help the department develop African diasporic dance skills and equip students with meaningful experiences of curricular development. In her proposal, McCarthy-Brown said she will work to be a “change agent – changing the way people think about dance through disrupting historically privileged canons of teaching dance technique, unlocking new pathways of learning and creative processing for movement, and embodying and demonstrating a value for other culturally-informed movement practices.”

“I am beyond excited to partner with my students and embark on a collaborative journey of learning and exploration at the University of Ghana in Accra,” McCarthy-Brown said. “We will be working with Department of Dance Professor David Quaye and dance students there to support a process of dance preservation through codification of the Agbekor dance.”