Lecturer
Korean Dance
freshleym001@hawaii.rr.com
freshley@hawaii.edu
Courses:
DNCE 105 Korean Dance
DNCE 305 Korean Dance
DNCE 405 Korean Dance
Mary Jo Freshley has both a Bachelor and Masters degree in Health and Physical Education from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. She taught at the Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu for 33 years. She has been teaching the Korean Dance class at the University of Hawai’i since 1998. Her teacher, Halla Huhm, was the first person to teach Korean Dance at the University and in the summer session of 1962 she signed up to take Korean dance from Halla Huhm. She continued at the Halla Huhm Korean Dance Studio where she has been for 60 years. She has studied in Korea several times starting in 1972 and in 2010 was interviewed for the oral history archives at the National Gugak Center in Seoul. She has also been working on the Halla Huhm Dance Collection archives at the Center for Korean Studies for many years which has attracted researchers who are interested in Korean culture abroad. In addition to Korean dance, she also studied and performed Javanese, Japanese, Okinawan, Filipino dance and also performed in modern dance concerts at Kennedy Theatre in the 1960s. She has received several awards from various Korean organizations and in 2018 was recognized as a Living Treasure of Hawaii by the Hongpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii.