Joe Nash, who has died aged 85, was a dancer, and became a historian, collector and the foremost archivist of African-American modern dance.
Born into a poor family in Harlem, he was drawn to ballet by a passion for dramatic themes. Undeterred by the barriers facing black dancers, he largely taught himself by drawing on his natural acrobatic skills, reading and studying photographs of dancers.
Following military service in occupied Germany at the end of the second world war, he entered the world of Broadway just as the struggle was getting under way to put black artists back on stage after the 1943 production of Oklahoma! marginalised them. One of his influences was the outstanding physicality of the dancer Pearl Primus, with whom he did a US-wide tour in 1946-47.
He made his Broadway debut in the 1946 production of Showboat, and, the following year, came to the Palace Theatre, London, with the original stage version of Finian's Rainbow, a satire on racism. He was in the 1951 production of the dance musical Flahooley, and featured in House Of Flowers (1954), the show that starred Pearl Bailey, Arthur Mitchell and Geoffrey Holder.
In 1948, Nash and his lifelong friend Walter Nicks began teaching at the Judimar school, a dance academy in Philadelphia that produced such notable figures as Judith Jamison, artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. His work included a 25-year involvement with the Christian tradition liturgical dance, often known in America as praise dancing, and the US National Council of Churches, for which he created the first black Christian education resources centre.
Nash worked with all the main black dance organisations, especially the Alvin Ailey centre. His compulsive collecting of every detail of the business led to requests for lectures in the 1970s, as awareness of black modern dance emerged.
His involvement became public with his work in the American Dance Festival and through Richard Long's book The Black Tradition In American Dance (1989), which drew largely on Nash's research. He edited numerous PhD drafts as a new generation of scholars broadened the area of dance studies, while making a series of archival bequests to major institutions. In 2001, many aspects of his work came together in the US television series Free To Dance.
Nash retained to the end an engaging smile and warm manner, and an ability to remember the details of his remarkable career.
· Joe Nash, dancer and historian, born October 5 1919; died April 13 2005