Lavinia Williams dies in Port-au-Prince after building Haiti’s dance schools

Lavinia Williams was born in Philadelphia on 2 July 1916 and trained at the Art Students League and with the American Negro Ballet. She learned Caribbean dance in the 1940s working with Katherine Dunham. From 1953 she gave nearly her whole working life to founding and running national dance schools in Haiti, Guyana and the Bahamas, and she taught generations of Haitian dancers that their own folk forms belonged on a stage. She left New York for Haiti again in February 1984. She died in Port-au-Prince on 19 July 1989; the New York Times reported a heart attack, others said poisoning.