Diamano Coura West African Dance Company

Since its inception in 1975, Diamano Coura, under Director Dr. Zak Diouf and Artistic Director Naomi Washington, has implemented its mission through ongoing workshops, performances, youth programs, touring engagements, lecture demonstrations, community outreach, and creative partnership programs with renowned artists and performing companies. In addition, Diamano Coura strives to portray West African music and dance specifically as forms not simply for entertainment or exhibition, but rather, means by which communities educate, communicate, organize, and preserve their ancestral past. Diamano Coura, in the Senegalese Wolof language, means "those who bring the message." While the directors, Naomi and Zak, are respectively from Liberia and Senegal, Diamano Coura embodies an entourage of carefully trained male and female senior company dancers, actors, singers, acrobats, musicians, stiltwalkers, and visual artists from Mali, Senegal, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Gambia and the United States. Diamano Coura also embodies a junior company of 15 members and does outreach to over 500 youths between the ages five and seventeen within the San Francisco Bay Area. The Junior Company is a part of Diamano Coura's Youth and Arts-In-Education Program. Exemplifying the importance of the arts in education Diamano Coura's Junior and Senior Company have performed and made a strong impact on youths in the Los Angeles School District Young Audience Project, San Diego School District Artist-In-Residence Project, as well as countless young people in theSan Francisco Bay Area school districts. Diamano Coura has also performed extensively in major theater houses and universities in the United States, Canada, and Europe while also being invited to tour internationally.