Breai Michele

Executive Director

Breai Michele is a Baltimore-based cultural practitioner, educator, dancer, and community-engaged scholar whose work explores the intersections of African American history, vernacular arts, and social transformation. She holds an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School, where she was honored with the 2023 Peter J. Gomes Distinguished Alumni Award, and a BA in Geography and Urban Studies from Temple University, graduating magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Her graduate research examined Hip-Hop as a religious and moral framework for African American youth, shaping her interdisciplinary approach to arts education and cultural inquiry.

Michele developed Youth Truth for the American Friends Service Committee in Boston, an arts-based youth development initiative centering cultural expression as a site of critical consciousness. Since 2002, she has worked in Baltimore City Schools and community contexts, designing arts-integrated curricula that position youth as historians and cultural producers. Her projects, including The Corner and The Colony and Roots and Remixes, use interdisciplinary methods such as photojournalism and media production to examine colonization, diaspora, and urban life while amplifying youth voice as counter-narrative.

She currently serves as Executive Director of Moving History, a nonprofit advancing educational equity through culturally responsive, arts-integrated programming across dance, music, culinary, visual, and martial arts. Her work has been supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, Maryland Humanities, the Baltimore Children and Youth Fund, United Way, the Episcopal Diocese and others. She is also a recipient of the 2019 Women in the Arts Award from the Patapsco River, MD Chapter of The Links, Inc.

Michele is the founder of Guardian Dance Company (est. 2003), which uses performance as a method of historical transmission within the African Diaspora. The company has performed at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hippodrome Theatre, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Internationally, she has taught courses on race, culture, and dance at Herräng Dance Camp in Sweden (2022–2025), and movement in both Montreal and Toronto. She is a founding member of Collective Voices for Change, an international group committed to preserving the integrity of African American culture within vernacular jazz dance.

Her writing appears in Pipe Wrench Magazine, including “The Third Pig” and “Seeing in the Dark,” the latter recognized in Longreads’ Best of 2021.