Kariamu Welsh

Welsh was married to Molefi Kete Asante, an American academic, whom she met when she was a student and he was a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo; their marriage ended in 2000.

Welsh received numerous fellowships, grants, and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, the Creative Public Service Award of NY, a 1997 Pew Fellowship, a 1997 Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a 1998 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and three Senior Fulbright Scholar Awards.

Welsh received her Doctorate of Arts in Dance History from New York University (1993) and her BA (1972; in English) and MA (1975; humanities) from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

In 1985 she joined Temple's department of Africology and African American Studies and in 1999 Temple's dance department, eventually becoming the director of Temple’s Institute for African Dance Research and Performance. She retired in 2019. She was a scholar of cultural studies including performance and culture within Africa and the African diaspora. Welsh served as the Director of the Institute for African Dance Research and Performance.

In the 1970s Welsh established her own dance group, Kariamu & Company: Traditions, which adopted the Umfundalai dance technique, a pan-African contemporary technique still in use, that she created. The word umfundalai is Kiswahili for "essential." Based on both African artistic practices and diasporan African dance vocabulary, Umfundalai "seeks to articulate an essence of African–oriented movement" and, in Welsh's words, “an approach to movement that is wholistic [sic], body centric and organic.”

Kariamu Welsh Asante (born Carole Ann Welsh; September 22, 1949 – October 12, 2021) was an American contemporary dance choreographer and scholar whose awards include a National Endowment for the Arts, three Senior Fulbright Scholar awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was a professor at Temple University's Boyer School of Music and Dance.