The multidisciplinary artist Maria Bauman-Morales can attest that there has long been comfort in knowing that Ms. Yaa Asantewaa was watching and writing about dance. “It didn’t guarantee she was going to love the work,” she said. “It has to do with the fact that Eva is a black woman who is looking a little bit outside of the center to strategically place a spotlight through her writing.”

There certainly is a dearth of black writers in dance. But Ms. Yaa Asantewaa, who wrote for several publications including Dance Magazine and The Village Voice, forged her own path, including as the creator of the blog InfiniteBody. She made a curatorial splash in 2016 with “skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds,” an improvisatory evening at Danspace Project that focused on black women and gender nonconforming artists.

The event was part of “Lost & Found,” a series looking at the effect of AIDS on the dance community. The cast was awarded a 2017 Bessie award for outstanding performer; Ms. Yaa Asantewaa also won an honor for outstanding service to the field of dance.

That performance, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa said, was another form of demonstration — of community and collaboration. She was struck by “the quicksilver ability to think and to feel one another and the space,” which she called “the base of the black way of improvisation — whether it’s through music or the visual arts or spoken word or hip-hop or dance. It was unassailable.”

This season at Gibney, her first as the senior curatorial director, she has characteristically sought out choreographers with big ideas: Her choices include new works by Ita Segev, in an examination of her life as an anti-Zionist Israeli trans woman; Nia Love, in a look at the lingering traces of slavery; and Brother(hood) Dance!, in a meditation on the identity of black men.

“I’m an ally to the artist,” she said, “not only in terms of their audiences but also in terms of what they’re doing within institutions. My main mode of doing that is simply to bring them in.”