Michele Byrd-McPhee is a street dancer, cultural strategist, arts activist, and the founder of Ladies of Hip-Hop (LOHH), an organization dedicated to reclaiming and redefining the narrative of women and girls in Hip-Hop culture. A 2023 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Service to the Field, her work sits at the intersection of dance, cultural preservation, and social change rooted in the lived experience of Black and Brown women and the power of street and club dance traditions.

Byrd-McPhee is currently an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches Hip-Hop dance, Black performance theory, and street and club dance histories. She brings over two decades of experience as a cultural worker into the academic space, shaping the next generation of artists and scholars through an embodied approach that blends movement, history, and activism.

Byrd-McPhee is also the founder and artistic director of the LOHH Dance Collective, a company of intergenerational women street dancers, and the creator of the Black Dancing Bodies project, an ongoing performance and archival initiative to celebrate and preserve the voices and contributions of Black women in street and club dance culture. The project began in 2020 and was further developed during her 2024–2025 research fellowship at the Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU.

From 2021 to 2024, she led a transformative three-year partnership with SNIPES USA to launch LOHH + SNIPES Studio, New York’s only woman-led, woman-owned, and women-focused street dance and arts space. The studio became a hub for Hip-Hop communities historically excluded from traditional dance institutions—offering classes, rehearsals, performances, and events that centered equity and access in dance.

Her leadership extends beyond the stage and studio—she has served as a grant panelist for the McKnight Foundation and DanceNYC, and is a former voting member of the Bessie Award Committee. In 2020, she was the Integrated Arts Residency Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she designed and taught the course ‘Hip-Hop, Women and the World’.

One of her greatest honors came in 2023, when she was featured in ‘Know The Elements’, a permanent mural in North Philadelphia commemorating Hip-Hop’s 50th anniversary. Painted by artists Christian “TAME ARTZ” Rodriguez and Bill Strobel, the mural stands as a lasting tribute to the culture and its pillars, 

Michele Byrd-McPhee and Ladies of Hip-Hop are proudly represented by SOZO, a women-led management agency committed to uplifting artists whose work fuels cultural and community impact.