cultural value of black dance, but she clearly contributed to changing perceptions of blacks in America by showing society that as a black woman, she could be an intelligent scholar, a beautiful dancer, and a skilled choreographer. As Julia Foulkes pointed out, "Dunham's path to success lay in making high art in the United States from African and Caribbean sources, capitalizing on a heritage of dance within the African Diaspora, and raising perceptions of African American capabilities." Awards and honors Over the years Katherine Dunham has received scores of special awards, including more than a dozen honorary doctorates from various American universities. In 1971 she received the Heritage Award from the National Dance Association. In 1979 at Carnegie Hall, she received the Albert Schweitzer Music Award "for a life's work dedicated to music and devoted to humanity." In 1983 she was a recipient of one of the highest artistic awards in the United States, the Kennedy Center Honors. In 1986 the American Anthropological Association gave her a Distinguished Service Award. In 1987 she received the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, and was also inducted into the National Museum of Dance's Mr. & Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, New York. She also received a Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. In 1989 she was awarded a National Medal of Arts, an honor shared by only two other University of Chicago alumni, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Dunham has her own star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. In 2000 she was named one of the first one hundred of "America's Irreplaceable Dance Treasures" by the Dance Heritage Coalition. In 2002 Molefi Kete Asante included her in his book 100 Greatest African Americans. In 2004 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Dance Teacher magazine. In 2005, she was awarded "Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research" by the Congress on Research in Dance. See also List of dancers Further reading References Sources Aschenbrenner, Joyce. Katherine Dunham: Dancing A Life. US: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Chin, Elizabeth. "Katherine Dunham's Dance as Public Anthropology." ..American Anthropologist.. 112, no. 4 (December 2010): 640–642. Katherine Dunham's Dance as Public Anthropology. Chin, Elizabeth. Katherine Dunham: Recovering an Anthropological Legacy, Choreographing Ethnographic Futures. Advanced Seminar Series. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced research Press, 2014. Biography Cruz Banks, Ojeya. "Katherine Dunham: Decolonizing Anthropology Through African American