Featured Artist | Hip-Hop & Freestyle | Red Bull Dance Your Style
Ruthie Fantaye: The Hip-Hop Dancer Who Chose Authenticity Over Approval
Her parents needed convincing, her first dance scene loved Black culture more than it welcomed Black dancers, and her first competition was a Red Bull qualifier in 2023. Two years later she was dancing for Team USA on World of Street Woman Fighter.
By Dance Mogul Magazine | Featured Artist | September 2026
Ruthie_Fantaye | Photo: Natt Lim / Red Bull Content Pool;SOURCE
Artist Spotlight
Ruthie Fantaye, who dances as Fantaye, is a Los Angeles hip-hop dancer, choreographer and educator with Ethiopian roots. She started in a choreography-based community in 2018, turned to hip-hop in 2019, and entered her first competition, the Red Bull Dance Your Style Los Angeles qualifier, in April 2023. She has choreographed and danced for VMo and LFG Crew, performed at World of Dance events in Los Angeles and Chicago, and in 2025 represented the United States with the crew MOTIV on Mnet’s World of Street Woman Fighter, where MOTIV finished third. She mentors young Black girls in dance, and she was named in the announced field for the 2026 Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final in Tampa.
File // At a Glance
NAME — Ruthie Fantaye
DANCES AS — Fantaye
ROOTS — Los Angeles | Ethiopian heritage
STYLE — Hip-hop | freestyle | choreography
SCHOOL — Santa Monica College
CREWS — MOTIV (Team USA) | choreographer and dancer for VMo and LFG Crew
TELEVISION — World of Street Woman Fighter, Mnet, 2025 (MOTIV, third place)
STAGES — World of Dance Los Angeles 2022 | World of Dance Chicago 2025
WORK — Educator and mentor to young Black girls in dance
RED BULL — First competition: Los Angeles qualifier, 2023 | named in the 2026 Tampa field
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460 Million-Plus Views of the Show’s Videos on Mnet’s Channel |
3rd MOTIV’s Finish for Team USA |
6 International Crews on the Show |
2023 First Competition: Red Bull Los Angeles |
Hip-hop is the most loved dance culture on earth, and that love has a strange side effect. It can fill a room with people who adore the culture and still leave the people it came from feeling like outsiders. Ruthie Fantaye walked into exactly that room. “I found myself in a dance space that wasn’t filled with Black people, but people who loved Black culture,” she told Essence. “It was so weird for me to see people who wanted to be me but couldn’t and then shamed me for being me.”
Most dancers in that position do one of two things: they shrink to fit, or they leave. She left the scene and kept the dance. “I finally accepted myself and didn’t need other people’s validation,” she said. What followed moved fast. Her first competition was a Red Bull Dance Your Style qualifier in 2023. In 2025 she was on Korean television, dancing for the United States on World of Street Woman Fighter, a show whose videos have been watched hundreds of millions of times. In 2026 her name was in the national final field for Tampa.
This profile makes two arguments. The first is that authenticity is not a slogan in freestyle. It is a competitive advantage, because in a battle nobody can hand you a style — you either have one or you are borrowing one, and the crowd can tell. The second matters more to Dance Mogul Magazine. Loving a culture and crediting its people are not the same thing, and Fantaye has spent her career insisting on the difference — now by mentoring the young Black girls who will walk into those rooms next.
Los Angeles, Ethiopian Roots and Parents Who Needed Convincing
Fantaye grew up in Los Angeles in a family with Ethiopian roots, and dance was not the plan her parents had in mind. Essence reported that they did not initially support her pursuing it, a detail repeated in fan profiles written during her television run. She studied at Santa Monica College while the pull toward dance kept growing.
She has a simple explanation for why it won. “I’ve always been a person that, like, can’t focus unless I love something,” she said. For some people that is a weakness. For a dancer it is a filter: it tells you what is worth the thousands of hours.
Here is what a young dancer should take from that. Family doubt is common, especially in immigrant families where a stable path can feel like the whole point of the sacrifice that came before. It is not always a verdict on you. Sometimes it is a request for proof. The most convincing proof is not an argument at the dinner table. It is years of seriousness — the kind that eventually puts your daughter on an international broadcast representing her country.
A Scene That Loved the Culture More Than Its People
She began dancing seriously in 2018, in a choreography-based community — the Los Angeles world of studio classes, where a choreographer teaches a routine and the sharpest dancers get filmed doing it. It is a powerful training ground, and for her it was also where she first felt the contradiction she later described: a room full of people who loved Black culture and did not always make room for a Black woman being herself inside it.
In 2019 she left that space to pursue hip-hop dance. The move was not only stylistic. It was a decision about where she could be whole. “Being authentic in who I am has connected me to hip-hop,” she said.
Note the order of that sentence. Authenticity came first, and the connection to hip-hop followed from it. That is the opposite of how many dancers approach the form — learning the moves and hoping an identity arrives with them. Hip-hop dance was built by young people expressing who they were, and a dancer who starts from who she is ends up closer to the source than one who starts from the steps.
“Black girls are so powerful and impactful when they stand in their truth.” — Ruthie Fantaye (Essence Girls United, 2023)
Know the Form: Choreography Dancer vs. Hip-Hop Freestyler
Two worlds share the words “hip-hop dance,” and they train different muscles. In the choreography world, a choreographer builds a routine to a song, teaches it in class, and dancers are judged on how sharply and expressively they execute it — often on camera. In hip-hop freestyle, there is no routine. Dancers build a personal vocabulary from the form’s foundations — grooves, bounces and rocks, and the party dances passed down through clubs and block parties — and improvise to whatever music plays, usually in cyphers and battles.
Why it matters in a battle: in choreography, excellence can be taught one eight-count at a time. In freestyle, the most important thing cannot be handed to you — your own way of moving to music you have never heard. That is why her line about authenticity is also a line about technique. A freestyler who is not being herself runs out of things to say. Our Dance Knowledge Hub breaks down other forms the same way, and our hip-hop coverage goes deeper into the culture.
First Competition: Red Bull, Los Angeles, 2023
Many dancers work their way up through small local jams before trying a major brand’s battle. Fantaye started at the top of the ladder. Her first competition, Essence reported, was the Red Bull Dance Your Style qualifier in Los Angeles on April 1, 2023.
That is a bold first choice. Dance Your Style has no judging panel to reward potential. The crowd votes, the music is a surprise, and a first-timer stands in the same light as veterans with years of battle experience. Choosing that format for a debut says something about her: she would rather learn in front of a real crowd than wait until she felt ready.
The rest of her competitive record shows the same appetite. Step x Step Dance filmed her in the open styles top sixteen at Freestyle Session 24, one of the longest-running street dance events in the country, against K’NIIN.
Fantaye vs. K’NIIN in the open styles top sixteen at Freestyle Session 24 | Video: Step x Step Dance/YouTube
Team USA on World of Street Woman Fighter
In 2025 the biggest audience of her career arrived through Korean television. World of Street Woman Fighter, Mnet’s international edition of its hit street dance competition franchise, aired from May 27 to July 22, 2025, with six crews representing Australia, Korea, Japan, New Zealand and the United States. The American crew was MOTIV, and Fantaye was on it, alongside Marlee Hightower, Bella, Kaidi, Nyssa and Logistx, the breaker who represented the United States at the 2024 Olympics.
MOTIV went deep. The crew reached the final stage and finished third, eliminated in a semifinal elimination battle by Bumsup; Osaka Ojo Gang won the season. For a crew of American dancers competing in a Korean format built around missions, mega-crew performances and head-to-head battles, third place against the best women’s crews from four other countries was a statement.
The scale of the audience is the part that matters for her career. By July 2025, The Korea Times reported, videos related to the show on Mnet’s dance channel, The CHOOM, had passed 460 million cumulative views. Fans took notice of her specifically; fan profiles written during the broadcast described her expressive, lively reactions on camera. MOTIV’s own account introduced her to that audience with a warning: “Beware of Ruthie Fantaye” — “She will eat the dance floor. This Hiphop dancer is proud to represent her roots and herself!”
Read that caption again, because it is her whole story in two sentences. Roots and self. The dancer who once felt shamed for being herself was introduced to a global audience as someone proud of exactly that.
Crews, Stages and the Choreographer Inside the Freestyler
She did not abandon choreography when she turned to freestyle. She added it back on her own terms. Her teaching biography says she has choreographed and danced for VMo and LFG Crew, and she has performed on World of Dance stages, the competition circuit where crews and soloists showcase set pieces: fan profiles list World of Dance Los Angeles 2022 as a favorite moment of her career, and World of Dance published her performance at its 2025 Chicago event.
Ruthie Fantaye, featuring B. Parrish, at World of Dance Chicago 2025 | Video: World of Dance/YouTube
Here is why that combination matters. A dancer who can build choreography and survive freestyle is employable in both halves of the industry: the set piece that a camera needs and the improvisation that a battle demands. World of Street Woman Fighter tested exactly that mix, with rehearsed crew performances in one episode and one-on-one battles in the next. Her path through Los Angeles’ choreography scene, which she once found uncomfortable, turned out to be part of what made her ready for it.
Tampa, 2026: Back Where She Started
Three years after her first competition at a Red Bull qualifier, Fantaye’s name was in the announced sixteen-dancer field for the 2026 USA National Final at the Tampa Convention Center on September 19. Her MOTIV teammate Marlee Hightower was in the same bracket.
Here is the honest part. Red Bull’s official recap names the final eight — JREAMZ, Lily Frias, Kidd The Monster, Jesse Sykes, Marlee Hightower, Surge, Tyler D. Creator and Harini Nilakantan — and Fantaye is not among them. The recap also confirms that Tyler D. Creator competed without appearing on the pre-event lists, which means one announced dancer did not take the floor, and the sources we reviewed do not say who. So Dance Mogul Magazine will not claim that Fantaye battled on September 19, and we will not claim that she did not. The full field is documented in our Red Bull Dance Your Style Newsroom, and this paragraph will be updated when the record is clear.
What is not in doubt is the arc. A dancer whose first competition was a Red Bull city qualifier in 2023 was, by 2026, one of sixteen names on the national final poster.
Mentoring the Next Black Girl in the Room
The most important line in her Essence profile is not about her own career. It is about the moment she realized her story could change someone else’s.
“I didn’t realize that I could be impactful to somebody, and instead of pushing through for myself, I pushed for other young girls.” — Ruthie Fantaye (Essence Girls United, 2023)
She works as an educator mentoring young Black girls in dance, and her teaching biography describes the goal in terms that echo her own path: encouraging individualism in everyone she teaches and helping students “carve a path as unique as themselves.” It also describes her as someone who uses movement “to be a light and bring joy to everyone she encounters.”
Think about who that serves. The next Black girl who walks into a studio where the culture is loved but she is not quite welcomed will, if she is lucky, have a teacher who has been in that exact room and came out whole. That is not a side project. It is the most durable kind of credit there is: making sure the people a culture came from keep a place at its center.
The Honors, and the Difference Between Loving a Culture and Crediting It
2022 — World of Dance Los Angeles.
2023 — First competition, Red Bull Dance Your Style Los Angeles. April 1.
2025 — Third place with MOTIV, representing the United States on World of Street Woman Fighter. Mnet.
2025 — World of Dance Chicago.
2026 — Named in the announced USA National Final field, Red Bull Dance Your Style. Tampa.
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 Ruthie Fantaye’s full competition and choreography history. Not because the work was not honored, but because the industry has never built the infrastructure to track dance credit properly.
Loving the culture is not the same as crediting its people
Her description of her first scene names a problem this magazine has written about for more than fifteen years, in fewer words than we have ever managed. People who “wanted to be me but couldn’t and then shamed me for being me.” That is the credit gap at human scale. Hip-hop dance was built by young people in Black and Latino communities. It is now taught, filmed, sold and loved everywhere. The danger was never that the world would stop loving it. The danger is that the world keeps the moves and loses the people.
The corrective is the one she practices: stand in your own truth, teach the history along with the steps, and make sure the next generation of the people who created the culture sees itself at the front of the room. It is why The Legacy exists on this site, and why we trace the American social dance movement back to the people who built it.
Where Ruthie Fantaye Is Now
As of late September 2026, Fantaye is a Los Angeles hip-hop dancer, choreographer and educator with an international television run behind her, a place in the 2026 national final field, and a teaching practice aimed at the girls coming up behind her.
Beyond that, we are not going to invent a schedule for her. When there is verified news, this publication will report it.
A championship is a night. A career is a decade. Hers took her from a room where she did not fit to a world stage where she was introduced as proud of her roots. Dance Mogul Magazine will keep following it.
Career Timeline
LOS ANGELESGrows up in a family with Ethiopian roots; her parents do not initially support her dancing.
SANTA MONICA COLLEGEStudies while her commitment to dance grows.
2018Begins dancing seriously in a choreography-based community.
2019Leaves that space to pursue hip-hop dance.
2022Performs at World of Dance Los Angeles, later named a favorite moment of her career.
APRIL 1, 2023Enters her first competition, the Red Bull Dance Your Style Los Angeles qualifier; Essence Girls United profiles her that month.
MAY–JULY 2025Represents the United States with MOTIV on Mnet’s World of Street Woman Fighter; the crew finishes third.
2025Performs at World of Dance Chicago.
SEPTEMBER 19, 2026Named in the announced sixteen-dancer field for the Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final in Tampa.
What She Represents to Young, Up-and-Coming Dancers
The assumption she broke is that you have to fit a room to succeed in it. She left the room that asked her to shrink and found the one where she could grow. Read as a method, her path shows five stages any serious dancer can locate herself on.
1. Let love decide your focus
“I’ve always been a person that, like, can’t focus unless I love something.” Pay attention to what holds you. That is where the hours will come from.
2. Leave rooms that ask you to shrink
She left a scene that loved the culture but not her place in it. Leaving a room is not quitting dance. Sometimes it is the only way to keep dancing as yourself.
3. Start where it is hard
Her first competition was a Red Bull qualifier in front of a voting crowd. You will never feel fully ready. Learn in front of real people anyway.
“She will eat the dance floor. This Hiphop dancer is proud to represent her roots and herself!” — MOTIV, introducing Fantaye during World of Street Woman Fighter (2025)
4. Build both muscles
Choreography and freestyle are different skills. She kept both, and an international show that demanded both found her ready.
5. Push for the girl behind you
She turned her own hard road into mentorship for young Black girls. Your story is somebody else’s map. If you are building the discipline behind a plan of your own, our workbooks were made for it.
Why Ruthie Fantaye 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. Fantaye’s story shows what that means in practice: dance as the road to self-acceptance, to an international stage, and to the chance to mentor the girls who come next.
The movement vocabulary that drives mainstream entertainment is overwhelmingly born in Black and Latino 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. 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. Few dancers have described the problem as precisely as she did, and fewer have answered it by building the next generation instead of simply surviving the current one.
If her story lands with you, keep going: read how her MOTIV teammate built a career in our Marlee Hightower profile, explore the full range of forms in our Dance Styles Hub, and study the artists shaping the industry in Black Creative Directors & Choreographers.
Frequently Asked Questions About Ruthie Fantaye
Who is Ruthie Fantaye?
Ruthie Fantaye, who dances as Fantaye, is a Los Angeles hip-hop dancer, choreographer and educator with Ethiopian roots. She represented the United States with the crew MOTIV on Mnet’s World of Street Woman Fighter in 2025 and was named in the 2026 Red Bull Dance Your Style USA National Final field.
Was Fantaye on World of Street Woman Fighter?
Yes. She was a member of MOTIV, the United States crew on Mnet’s World of Street Woman Fighter, which aired from May to July 2025. MOTIV finished third; Osaka Ojo Gang won.
Who else was on MOTIV with Fantaye?
The show’s MOTIV lineup included Marlee Hightower, Bella, Kaidi, Nyssa and Logistx alongside Fantaye.
Where is Ruthie Fantaye from?
She is from Los Angeles and has Ethiopian roots. She studied at Santa Monica College.
What was Fantaye’s first competition?
According to Essence, her first competition was the Red Bull Dance Your Style Los Angeles qualifier on April 1, 2023.
Did Fantaye compete in Tampa in 2026?
She was named in the announced sixteen-dancer field for the September 19, 2026 USA National Final in Tampa. Red Bull’s recap does not place her in the final eight, and because one announced dancer was replaced without public explanation, Dance Mogul Magazine does not claim she took the floor.
What does Ruthie Fantaye teach?
She works as an educator mentoring young Black girls in dance, and her teaching focuses on encouraging individualism so students can carve a path as unique as themselves.
Keep Exploring
Dance Mogul Magazine documents the artists who build the culture and the careers that grow out of it. Start with the Featured Artist series, dig into the Archive, follow the season in the Red Bull Dance Your Style Newsroom, and browse everything we have published in the Article Library.
Reporting sources: Essence Girls United (2023); The Korea Times (June and July 2025); published records of World of Street Woman Fighter; her Inspired Movement teaching biography; MOTIV’s social posts; World of Dance; Step x Step Dance; Red Bull’s USA National Final recap (September 2026); and Dance Mogul Magazine’s Tampa newsroom. Career details reflect verified public reporting as of September 2026. Where the record is incomplete, this article says so.
Ruthie Fantaye Fantaye World of Street Woman Fighter MOTIV Team USA Hip-Hop Dance Los Angeles Dance Black Women in Dance Ethiopian American Red Bull Dance Your Style Featured Artist Tampa 2026
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