A 2023 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Service to the Field, Michele Byrd-McPhee is a street dancer, an arts activist and tireless advocate for girls and women who has been working for decades to re-contextualize spaces and conversations about Hip-Hop culture along gender, sex, cultural, socio-historical and racial lines.

Her work situates Black dance forms, theories, dance techniques and the value of the lived artistic experience, in spaces that honor and acknowledge cultural roots along with the many creative pioneers who have shaped them. This is especially important given the ways in which Black dance has been co-opted, appropriated without acknowledgement to its cultural origins.

Awarded the 2020 Integrated Arts Residency Fellowship at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Byrd-McPhee created and taught her course “Hip-Hop, Women and the World”. She has also served as a grant panelist for the prestigious McKnight Foundation, DanceNYC, and served as a voting member of the Bessie Award Committee.

Most recently, in partnership with SNIPES USA, Michele opened New York’s only woman-led, woman-owned and women-focused street dance & arts space. With the LOHH x SNIPES partnership Byrd-McPhee is literally and figuratively flipping the dance world on its head! Historically, there has been a hierarchy in dance where ballet and forms derived from ballet are atop the global "ladder of dance"; receiving priority in resources, access and in what and who is presented and taught. The LOHH X SNIPES Studio space is dedicated to street and club dance forms. In this space we have been able to present events, provide rehearsal space and classes for communities that are normally forgotten and systematically excluded from traditional dance spaces.

Presently, Byrd-McPhee is relishing her roles as a performer and production manager for The Jazz Continuum, along with her 20-year commitment as Executive Director for Ladies of Hip-Hop and artistic director of LDC (LOHH Dance Collective).