Yauri Dalencour | Artist, Academic & Activist

Yauri Sabrinthia Dalencour (neé Kelly) is a principal dancer, artist scholar, and visual artist (illustrator, surface. and graphic designer), digital archivist, education leader, cultural anthropologist, UX and AL/ML Research Scientist and entrepreneur. As an interdisciplinary dance artist Yauri’s dream has always been to dance professionally, write on dance and culture and to open a Dance Museum.

Concerned with intersections between art, culture, education and technology and passionate about leadership and change, Yauri uses dance, visual art, text and new media to create multi-sensory, multi-model performance works and installations exploring racial, gender, socio-economic themes and embodied experience. She is the Founder/Artistic Director of Yauri Dalencour Dance that has several initiatives.

Yauri’s dance training includes early study at the Reston Institute for the Arts, professional training at the Alvin Ailey American Dance School in NYC, Alonzo King LINES Ballet in San Francisco, alongside her dance degree programs and training at dance studios throughout New York City, San Francisco, Italy and Spain where she has lived, studied and performed. 

Yauri is a classically (ballet), traditionally (W. African Dance) and modern (Horton and Graham techniques) trained dancer and classically trained anthropologist and served as Katherine Dunham’s personal archivist in New York City during Dunham’s last year of life. Her extensive work on Dunham’s archival collection contributed to the preservation of Dunham’s legacy through the Library of Congress Katherine Dunham Archives.

Yauri holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (Performance) from Goddard College in Vermont and is a graduate of NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education, Culture and Human Development earning a Masters of Arts in the Performing Arts Professions – Dance and Dance Education. She earned both a BFA in Dance and BA in International Studies from Adelphi University in Long Island, NY also minoring in African American And Ethnic Studies. 

Yauri pursed a PhD in Dance at Temple University’s Center for the Performing and Cinematic Arts at the Boyer School of Music and Dance where she finished ABD (doctoral training/advanced coursework and comprehensive exams). She is a now a doctoral candidate at Antioch University in the Graduate School of Leadership & Change where her research centers on arts, culture and education leadership, interdisciplinary innovation, technology studies, and equity-driven transformation in organizations and communities. Yauri’s doctoral research examines relationships between dance programs, visual culture social media and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) which she began in 2005.

When Yauri moved from NYC to the San Francisco Bay Area in the heart of Silicon Valley for her husband’s NYC Google office that was moved to its Mountain View Headquarter’s she expanded her artistic practice into emerging technology. She guest taught at Stanford University and attended a San Francisco–based technology boot camp focused on business development, coding, and UX design, taking roles in UX and product design and became a UX/Empathy Coach in multiple startups across Silicon Valley, including ventures supported by Stanford University’s StartX and 500 Startups. Yauri also collaborated with design-led organizations such as IDEO as a Design Mentor for their product Design Challenges of which the product she worked with received funding.

Yauri returned to the east coast a few years later with her husband and children and went on to serve as a founding team member at a Fortune 10 company, where she helped stand up a new UX practice—integrating design process with improvisation and creative methodologies drawn from her background in dance, art, theatre and cultural anthropology. There, she designed, launched, and led a UX Education Academy that scaled across a workforce of more than 10K employees. She later joined META (formerly Facebook) on the FAIR (Foundational Artificial Intelligence Research) team as a Domain Expert in Dance and Movement Analysis for AI and Machine Learning. At Meta, she contributed to the Ego-Exo4D project, co-authoring the highly cited, Ego-Exo4D: Understanding Skilled Human Activity from First- and Third-Person Perspectives presented at  The Computer Vision Foundation annual conference in 2025. 

As Founder and Artistic Director of Yauri Dalencour Dance Art Design, Yauri leads an interdisciplinary arts organization whose initiatives span performance, education and community outreach, archival services, and dance documentary practice. In 2007, she coined the term ethnodanceology and founded her community-based initiative EthnodanceologyCreative™, grounding her work in culturally situated, embodied research and pedagogy . 

In 2017, she acquired Dancetime Publications, where she serves as CEO and Owner overseeing the distribution of nearly two dozen documentary films in dance nationally and  internationally to colleges, universities and libraries as well as to the private sector. She also holds the largest collection of dance on film in the world going back 500 years.

Yauri is a member of the Advisory Council and serves as Director of Awards  for the National Dance Education Organization. She is Co-Founder of the Brelii with her husband, Phil Dalencour, an Editorial Board Member of the Taylor & Francis–published, peer-reviewed journal Dance Education in Practice, and a member of the Editorial Committee of Jack and Jill of America, Inc.

Yauri has performed as a solo artist and with dance companies and Broadway/musical theatre nationally and internationally and was part of the original cast of Witness Uganda along side Leslie Odum Jr. (Hamilton, Harriet…), Tituss Burgess (The Little Mermaid, Guys and Dolls, Moulin Rouge, Oh Mary!, Unbreakable Jonny Schmidt…), Jessica Dickey (The Amish Project), Sophia Thomas (Mamma Mia!), Masi Asare (Sympathy Jones, Paradise Square) and others. 

 She was featured as an expecting mother (with her 4th child) in the year-long, nationally syndicated Vaseline x Regina King “America Reborn / ‘Equitable Care for Skin of Color’ (#healthequity) campaign. Yauri’s monograph installation, Eloquent Labor//Unfractured Woman, and the nationally acclaimed and multi-award winning, Society’s Cage (#societyscage) — a touring public art installation that premiered on the National Mall traveled to Tulsa in commemoration of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre where hundreds of Black Families were eviscerated has been seen nationally and internationally. Society’s Cage has gone on to visit other major cities including Oakland, California, Baltimore (the Baltimore Museum) and Philadelphia for a stay at U Penn.   

Yauri is a contributor to the recent Google Doodle celebrating the Savoy Ballroom, and the Behind the Scenes of the Savoy short film, an interactive installation of the oldest Holocaust museum in the world, the Jewish Museum Frankfurt (Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt) of Frankfurt, Germany among many other partnerships.

Earlier in her career, Yauri served as a founding board member for choreographer, Camille A. Brown (Camille A. Brown and Dancers) acting as Fundraiser Chair for a successful Joyce Theatre gala honoring Carmen de Lavallade and former Alvin Ailey dancer, Danni Gee. Yauri worked as a digital archivist for the Ailey American Dance Foundation, with the collection exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2024 and 2025, and served as the first digital archivist for Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (New York LiveArts), with the collection now exhibited on the Google Arts & Culture platform (formerly, Google Culture Insititute). Yauri also worked at the Schomberg Center for Research and Black Culture as a Dance Choreographer and Dance History Educator for the Junior Scholars Program, where she taught alongside Chadwick Boseman and collaborated with fellow teaching artists including Boseman and others on faculty producing the program’s season production.

Yauri has held academic appointments at Temple University, Shenandoah Conservatory @Shenandoah University, and Howard University, (appointed by Phylicia Rashad). She has received honoraria from New York University, Stanford University, Gutman Community College, and The Dwight School, and has held teaching, consulting, and choreographic roles with the NYC Board of Education, and volunteering as a dance instructor for the  The Los Altos School District and others. 

A wife and mother of five, Yauri has given birth to four (the girls) of her five children at home in NYC and NoVa and her son at a birthing center at Sequoia Hospital in California and is a trained doula. Where her praxis examines motherhood as embodied knowledge it is a site for design, cultural memory work, transmission and liberation. She centers Black family life as expansive, joyful and visionary – resisting narratives that frame it as deficient, dismissible, or disposable and affirming its cultural weight and humanity across generations.