Hanan Hameen
CT dance teacher and social justice advocate aims to help raise the next generation of Black leaders
Growing up in 1980s New York City as a Black Muslim, the only place Hanan Hameen didn’t feel like an outcast was in the Pan-African dance community.
Since the sixth grade, she has dreamed of opening a school more inclusive of different learning styles and cultures than the ones she attended growing up. That dream led her to a career she never planned on: dance teacher.
“I found community in dance. Because it was one place. We came together. And it was about the dance. It is about it was about the movement,” she said.
In her 25-year career, Hameen has performed with over 13 dance companies, founded six and has owned four dance schools. Through her Artsucation Academy Network, founded in 2012, she heads multiple dance companies that teach hip-hop, African dance, drumming, and culture around New Haven, New York, across New England, and recently, Senegal.
In New Haven, she focuses on African dance in hopes it will help combat social injustice and violence among the youth in her neighborhood. If people understand they come from the same place, they’re less inclined to hurt one another, she said.
“African culture, it’s about community. And that’s what’s missing for the youth, that community and feeling that support,” Hameen said. “That’s why I also teach about Kwanzaa because it’s about self-determination, naming yourself, not what somebody else calls you. It is what you want to be called, or should be called. It’s not the names or labels people put on you.”
She is also the co-founder of the Official Juneteenth Coalition of Greater New Haven, where she’s organizing the 10th Juneteenth celebration with the International Festival of Arts & Ideas and a performance from one of her companies, the New Haven HipHop Conference.
Hameen’s interest in African dance grew in high school while she trained at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where every year a dance company from the African Diaspora would come teach about her heritage. By the summer, she plans to establish an in-person cultural exchange program between her New Haven students and the M’Bosse Dance Company in Senegal, where she’s taught her Artsucation curriculum since 2020.
“My grandmother always said, ‘Our purpose in life is to bring civilization and bring our people to the next level,’ ” she said. “It’s about seeing what was done before, honoring and acknowledging, and then seeing what can you do to help it to grow.”
How a diagnosis brought her to New Haven
Hameen moved to New Haven in 2012 at a time when she was forced to start over.
In 2010, the Bronx native was diagnosed with Lupus, an autoimmune disease. That year, she was in the process of earning her second master’s in educational leadership, running a dance school, performing with over a dozen dance companies and becoming a tenured high school teacher in New York City.
The doctors told her she was unfit to work and go back to school. She took a two-year hiatus from dancing, frequently visiting the hospital and moving in with her mother, a New Haven native.
“I thought my life was over,” she said.
But in 2012, Hameen moved to New Haven and led an “Africa is Me!” class on dance and drumming at the Stetson Library in New Haven, owned by her “Auntie” Diane X Brown. It was her first dance class since her Lupus diagnosis, and she started gaining her strength back, later becoming a Lupus support group facilitator.
“The drum is a healer; you get your dopamine release, and your endorphins are flowing through that movement and through that drum,” she said.
Brown said Hameen’s ability to keep students engaged and her commitment to helping them learn about Black culture resembles the education she received at Bowen/Peters School of Dance in the 1960s, co-founded by Angela Bowen, a human rights activist.
While Hameen doesn’t have her own boarding school, her Artsucation curriculum is similar to Bowen’s in that it embeds dance and African culture with traditional education.
“It’s not like we never had that in New Haven. We had it. And that school fizzled out,” Brown said. “And then with Hanan coming in, she was able to help to teach the younger generations.”
‘Leaders create more leaders’
Since she began teaching in New York City in 1997, Hameen has taught over one thousand students, many of whom she still keeps in touch with, she said.
Though most of her former students are now in their 20s to mid-30s and are parents, they call her ma, mom or mother. Or Ha-me-me. Many have walked into her classroom unable to afford dance shoes and have since climbed the social ladder to become entrepreneurs, Broadway dancers and advocates.
“For me, that’s what it’s all about,” she said. “I believe leaders create more leaders and more greatness, and we need more greatness.”
Gabrielle Hamilton, a Broadway dancer who began training with Hameen at three-years-old at the Uptown Dance Academy, said Hameen helped her find the confidence to speak up for herself and overcome body issues as a training ballerina.
Reina Pelle, her former student, is currently the dance captain for Hameen’s Keepers of the Culture Performing Arts Company in New Haven. At the Uptown Dance Academy in Brooklyn, Hameen embedded lessons about science, math and Black history and excellence into her courses — material she would never have learned in school.
As a teacher in New York City public schools, Pelle brings the same context and history into her lessons to ensure students learn about their heritage.
“When I teach my kids, I teach them to make sure you know who you are, and to know how powerful you are. So what she instilled in us, and she’s still instilling in me, and the future we bring into, to know the culture. We still make sure that you are still educating us on why we are here today. And why we do it,” she said.
This mindset helped her former student and trans activist, Nala Toussaint, overcome bullying in her childhood. Through Hameen’s lessons, Touissant was able to empathize with her perpetrators rather than seek revenge.
“I was able to learn about our history, learn about unity and learn about love and connection. I was able to have forgiveness, but also learn to build with my community and not resent,” she said.
‘Keepers of the culture’
In 2016, a few years after moving to New Haven, Hameen started the Neighborhood Music School’s Premiere Dance Academy, a program where students created dances centered around their battles with family issues, mental health struggles and discrimination, Tracey Albert, the school’s director of dance and wellness, said.
“I think during that time, they did a lot of talking about what they were going through because that’s where their ideas for their choreography came from: those conversations. So they got to really trust each other a lot,” Albert said.
During the pandemic, Hameen kept teaching Neighborhood Music School students virtually from Kaolack, Senegal, where she was working with members of the M’Bosse Dance Company and learning from them as part of her doctorate research.
Pelle said she will be there when Sengalese dancers come to New Haven as part of Hameen’s program.
“Dance is a language,” she said. “I’m just excited to learn their way and to teach them our way, and to blend it together and to see what we can really create.”
Right now, Hameen dedicates most of her time to planning the summer’s Juneteenth celebration, in which the theme will be “Voices of Freedom.”
“The musicians were ‘keepers of the culture,’ right? They’re the ones who kept the oral tradition alive. They were the poets, the drummers, the dancers. That’s how we always kept our stories as African people. So that’s our voices of freedom,” she said.