Grace Lavinia Poole Williams was born the second of six children in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a family of west-indian descent. She grew up in
Portsmouth, Virginia and Brooklyn, New York, and studied at
Washington Irving High School and then the
Art Students League of New York, where she joined the
American Negro Ballet, beginning her career in a number of dance companies and stage productions. Her work included
classical ballet,
folk,
modern,
musicals, and, most importantly,
Caribbean dance, which she mastered in the 1940s while working with
Katherine Dunham. She spent nearly the entirety of the years from 1953 through to the late 1980s teaching dance and founding and developing national schools of dance in
Haiti,
Guyana, and
the Bahamas. She spent most of the last years of her life teaching in
New York City, but left the United States for Haiti in February 1984.
The New York Times reported that she died of a heart attack in
Port-au-Prince, although several other sources and Beryl Campbell reported it as "some kind of food poisoning". Diana Dunbar, Lavinia's friend and student, arranged her funeral service. == Featured in ==