FEATURED CHOREOGRAPHER | CREATIVE DIRECTION | THE LEGACY
Jamaica Craft: The Choreographer Who Turned Movement Into Full Creative Authority
From a teenage dance troupe in Kansas City to Ciara's stages, Usher's videos, and the Pynk on P-Valley — how Jamaica Craft built a career that reaches past the choreography credit, and why her blueprint matters to every dancer reading this.
By Dance Mogul Magazine | Featured Choreographer | August 2026
Jamaica Craft — choreographer, artist developer, creative director | Dance Mogul Magazine
ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Jamaica Craft is a Kansas City-raised choreographer, artist developer, and creative director whose credits run from arena stages to prestige television. She has been the driving movement force behind Ciara's performances since early in the singer's career, and has worked with Usher, Justin Bieber, Ne-Yo, Missy Elliott, Nicki Minaj, Jessie J, Shakira, and Tinashe. She earned back-to-back MTV Video Music Award nominations for Best Choreography, and she built the movement language of Empire, Step Up: High Water, Lovecraft Country, and P-Valley. In 2025 she sat as a judge for Ciara Presents: Dance Icon; in 2026 her third season of P-Valley is finished and waiting on Starz.
You have almost certainly seen Jamaica Craft's work. You may not have seen her name attached to it. That gap — between the labor and the label — is one of the oldest problems in dance, and it is exactly why this story belongs in Dance Mogul Magazine.
Choreography is the discipline that carries a performance and gets named last. A video goes viral and the artist gets the headline. A television series earns awards and the craft categories skip past the person who taught the cast how to move like they belong in that world. Meanwhile the choreographer is in a rehearsal room at midnight, translating a producer's vague adjective into eight counts a human body can actually execute — on camera, on the tenth take, without getting hurt.
Craft has spent more than two decades in that room. What makes her career worth studying is not just the client list, impressive as it is. It is the shape of the climb: dancer, then choreographer, then artist developer, then creative director, then the person on the other side of the table deciding who gets the opportunity next. That progression is the real subject of this piece — because it is repeatable, and because most young dancers are never shown that it exists.
Kansas City First: Where the Work Ethic Got Built
Before the credits, there was Kansas City, Missouri. As a teenager, Craft founded her own dance troupe — the Trendsetters — which tells you something important about her instincts. She did not wait to be selected. She built the room she wanted to be in, and then filled it with other people.
That impulse has never left her work. In interviews she has described her earliest crew days as being fundamentally about community: who else in the neighborhood can dance, and how do we get them in here too. Her first professional booking came dancing for MC Hammer. From there she landed in Atlanta, dancing for TLC — a city and an era that shaped her eye permanently. Atlanta in that period was one of the most influential movement laboratories in the country, where club culture, southern rhythm, and stage performance fed each other constantly. She has also spoken openly about studying the craft of Atlanta's club dancers rather than dismissing it, which is a distinction that matters later in her career.
Her early choreography credits include the video for Kandi Burruss's "Don't Think I'm Not," the kind of regional job that never makes a highlight reel but teaches a young choreographer how to deliver under a real budget and a real clock.
“If I see you across the water, how can I help you?” — Jamaica Craft, describing the mindset she carried from her first dance troupe into every room since (Flaunt)
The Ciara Era: What Happens When a Choreographer Stays
Craft became Ciara's full-time choreographer and has been described by the singer's own camp as a key force behind her performances from the start of her career. In an industry that treats choreographers as interchangeable freelancers, that longevity is the story.
A one-off video gives you a paycheck. A long artist relationship gives you a body of work. Because Craft stayed, Ciara's movement identity had continuity — a recognizable attack, a control of stillness, a comfort with floor work and isolation that read the same from a music video to an awards stage to a tour. On the "Ride" video, Craft has explained that the vocabulary drew on male exotic dance technique, a deliberate sourcing choice that gave the piece its coiled, hypnotic quality. Three years later, her choreography for "Body Party" earned an MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Choreography.
Alongside the artist work, she moved into the highest-pressure format in the business: live award-show staging. Her résumé includes pieces directed for the Grammys, the American Music Awards, BET, and the World Music Awards — one-take television with no safety net, where a missed mark is permanent.
KNOW THE ROLE
Choreographer answers one question: what does the body do? Creative director answers a bigger one: who is this artist, and what should the whole world around them look and feel like?
That means concept, casting, staging, camera language, wardrobe conversations, and the through-line that ties a single into a tour into an era. Craft said years ago that she wanted to be recognized not only as a choreographer but as the creative director behind superstars — the person who builds the vision of who an artist is. She then went and did it. If you are a young dancer reading this: that job title is available to you, and choreography is the on-ramp.
Usher, Bieber, and a Widening Circle
The reach expanded fast. Craft's work with Usher on "Good Kisser" brought her a second MTV Video Music Award nomination for Best Choreography, shared with Todd Sams — back-to-back nominated years in a category where the same short list of names tends to recycle for decades.
Her client history also includes Justin Bieber during his early global run, Ne-Yo, Missy Elliott, Nicki Minaj, Jessie J, Shakira, and Tinashe. Read that list as a range test rather than a brag sheet. Pop, R&B, hip-hop, and global crossover all demand different physical logic, different camera instincts, and different levels of technical support for the artist. Very few choreographers are trusted across all of them, and the ones who are usually got there the same way she did — by being the person who solves the problem instead of the person who needs one solved for them.
Jamaica Craft with a longtime collaborator | Dance Mogul Magazine archives
Television and Film: Choreography as Storytelling
The move into scripted television is where Craft's work stopped being about performance and started being about character. Music choreography asks a dancer to look powerful. Screen choreography asks an actor to move like a specific person with a specific history — and to do it while hitting a mark, holding a line, and serving a scene.
On Fox's Empire, she became widely recognized for the show's musical performance sequences. She also choreographed Step Up: High Water, and worked in film on The Boss and Fist Fight.
Then came HBO's Lovecraft Country, which asked something much harder. Craft built the movement for the series across its full run — a point she has had to make repeatedly, since one sequence became so famous that people assumed it was her only contribution. That sequence was the horrifying minstrel jig performed by Topsy and Bopsy, which she researched and assembled from period minstrel movement mixed with regional Chicago and Miami styles. In the same series she choreographed the sequence in which Montrose finds the freedom to live openly, and she used the production as an opportunity to hire from inside the ballroom, drag, transgender, and broader LGBTQ+ communities whose vocabulary the work drew on. That is not a small detail. That is a choreographer using her hiring power as the point.
Her work on Starz's P-Valley raised the technical stakes again. The series demanded pole choreography of real athletic risk, performed by actors, repeatedly, safely. Craft assembled a team of pole specialists, built strength and conditioning into the process, and brought working club dancers into rehearsals so the cast could absorb not just the tricks but the culture, the timing, and the ease of physical proximity that the world of the Pynk required. With Brandee Evans, she developed Mercedes's signature drop over weeks of preparation before cameras ever rolled — designing not just a move but a character's authority.
“I wanted Brandee to have the power as she moved” — Jamaica Craft on building Mercedes's presence for P-Valley (Variety)
The Awards — and the Ones That Don't Exist Yet
Craft's two MTV Video Music Award nominations for Best Choreography — for Ciara's "Body Party" and Usher's "Good Kisser" — put her inside one of the very few awards categories that name choreographers at all. Getting nominated in consecutive years, for two different superstar artists, in a category historically dominated by a tight circle of repeat names, is a real marker of standing in the field.
Here is the honest part, and Dance Mogul Magazine would rather print it than pad a page: there is no comprehensive, publicly maintained record of Jamaica Craft's full awards history. Not because the work was not honored, but because the industry has never built the infrastructure to track choreography credit properly. Her prestige television work sits inside series that collected significant critical recognition — P-Valley took multiple honors from the African American Film Critics Association, including Best TV Drama and Best Ensemble Cast — yet award ceremonies rarely have a line item for the person who authored the movement that made those performances legible.
That absence is not a footnote to her story. It is the argument. When a discipline is undercredited, its practitioners' achievements have to be documented deliberately, by publications willing to do it. Otherwise a body of work that shaped how millions of people understood a character, a song, or an era simply evaporates from the record.
Where Jamaica Craft Is Now
In 2025, Craft took a seat that says everything about where her career has arrived: judge. Alongside Ciara, she evaluated the finalists of Ciara Presents: Dance Icon, a national competition produced with Colossal in partnership with the Why Not You Foundation. More than 100,000 dancers entered. Eight finalists were flown to Phoenix, where Craft judged in person and Ciara joined virtually before appearing at the April 2025 finale. The winner, Lexington Suttle, took a $20,000 prize and a spot in an upcoming Ciara music video, and the broader effort raised over $2.5 million for the foundation's work in education and youth empowerment.
Sit with the symmetry there. The teenager who started her own troupe in Kansas City because nobody handed her a stage is now the person deciding which unknown dancer gets one.
Her next major release is already finished. P-Valley wrapped production on its third season in November 2024, and Starz has confirmed the season is coming in 2026 — but as of this publication no exact premiere date has been announced, and the wait has stretched across a full industry cycle. Craft's most technically demanding body of choreography to date is, in effect, sitting in a vault waiting on a network calendar. She continues to be represented by King Creative Group.
Beyond that, we are not going to invent a schedule for her. Public reporting on her 2026 slate is thin, which is normal for creative directors whose projects are under wrap. When there is verified news, this publication will report it.
The Full Creative Potential: Five Stages Her Career Maps Out
Read as a career path rather than a résumé, Craft's trajectory shows five distinct stages. Any serious dancer can locate themselves on this ladder — which is the whole reason we are laying it out.
1. Become the most reliable person in the room
Before the credits came the bookings, and bookings go to dancers who are prepared, coachable, early, and low-drama. Talent opens the door once. Reliability is what gets you called back.
2. Build one deep artist relationship, not ten shallow ones
The Ciara partnership is the engine of Craft's whole career. One artist who trusts you completely will generate more work, more range, and more creative freedom than a dozen one-off gigs. Depth compounds; scattering does not.
3. Learn to move story, not just bodies
The jump from music video to scripted television is a jump in literacy. It requires understanding character, period, subtext, and camera. Craft made that jump with Empire, Lovecraft Country, and P-Valley, and it doubled the size of her career.
4. Claim the vision, not just the execution
Choreographers get hired to execute someone else's idea. Creative directors get hired to have the idea. Craft named that ambition out loud years before she reached it, then built the credibility to be handed it.
5. Turn access into a door for other people
The final stage is the one most careers never reach: using your position to hire, cast, judge, and mentor. Craft has done it by staffing from the communities her work draws on, by moving professional dancers toward on-camera roles, and by sitting on the judging panel of a national competition built to fund youth programs. That is what a career looks like when it stops being about you.
Why Jamaica Craft Matters to Dance Mogul Magazine
Dance Mogul Magazine has published for over fifteen years on a single conviction: dance is the foundation, not the ceiling. Every story in this publication has to answer one question — how does this help someone become a better version of themselves? Craft's answer is unusually direct. She shows that the skill you built in a rehearsal room is transferable into authorship, into leadership, into ownership of a creative vision, and finally into the power to open doors for others.
She also represents a truth this publication has argued since 2010: the movement vocabulary that drives mainstream entertainment is overwhelmingly born in Black communities, in club culture, in street dance and hip-hop, and is then absorbed upward into pop, film, and television — frequently without credit traveling with it. Craft's insistence on sourcing her work honestly, naming its origins, and hiring from the communities that created it is precisely the standard we hold up. As a father and son Black owned dance publication, documenting that chain of authorship is not a side project for us. It is the work.
If her story lands with you, keep going: explore the full range of forms in our Dance Styles Hub, read more conversations with working professionals in our Exclusive Interviews, and study the pioneers whose work made these careers possible in The Legacy. If you are trying to build the discipline behind a plan like the one mapped above, our workbooks were built for exactly that.
Frequently Asked Questions About Jamaica Craft
Who is Jamaica Craft?
Jamaica Craft is an American choreographer, artist developer, and creative director from Kansas City, Missouri. She is best known as Ciara's longtime choreographer and for building the movement language of television series including Empire, Lovecraft Country, and P-Valley.
What is Jamaica Craft best known for?
Two bodies of work: her long creative partnership with Ciara, including the choreography for "Ride" and "Body Party," and her screen choreography — most notably the pole work on P-Valley and the period movement sequences on HBO's Lovecraft Country.
Has Jamaica Craft won awards?
She has received MTV Video Music Award nominations for Best Choreography in consecutive years — for Ciara's "Body Party" and, with Todd Sams, for Usher's "Good Kisser." No comprehensive public record of her full awards history exists, which reflects how poorly the industry tracks choreography credit rather than the scale of her work.
Which artists has Jamaica Craft worked with?
Her credits include Ciara, Usher, Justin Bieber, Ne-Yo, Missy Elliott, Nicki Minaj, Jessie J, Shakira, and Tinashe, plus staged pieces for the Grammys, the American Music Awards, BET, and the World Music Awards. Her first professional booking was dancing for MC Hammer, and she later danced for TLC in Atlanta.
What did Jamaica Craft do on P-Valley?
She served as the series choreographer, designing the club performances and pole routines. She built a team of pole specialists, integrated strength training and safety protocols for the cast, brought working dancers into rehearsals for authenticity, and developed Brandee Evans's signature move as Mercedes.
What is Jamaica Craft doing now?
In 2025 she judged Ciara Presents: Dance Icon, a national competition that drew over 100,000 entrants and raised more than $2.5 million for the Why Not You Foundation. Her third season of P-Valley completed production in November 2024 and Starz has confirmed a 2026 return, though no exact premiere date had been announced as of August 2026.
KEEP EXPLORING
Dance Mogul Magazine documents the artists who build the culture and the careers that grow out of it. Start with the Dance Styles Hub, dig into the Archive, build your foundation in the Dance Knowledge Hub, and read the full run of our Exclusive Interviews.
Reporting sources: Variety, Flaunt, AllHipHop, BOSSIP, NPR, People, Colossal / Why Not You Foundation press materials, Starz announcements, and MTV Video Music Award records. Career details reflect verified public reporting as of August 2026.
Jamaica Craft Choreographer Creative Director Ciara P-Valley Lovecraft Country Empire Hip-Hop Dance Dance Careers Dance Icon Black Women in Dance
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