Nora Chipaumire may not have fought in Zimbabwe’s war of independence, as some of her aunts did. But in her own way, she is also a warrior. And the three dances she will perform this weekend at the Light Box, the Miami Light Project’s new space in Wynwood, are tributes to the power and importance of struggle —against not only an unjust social order but preconceptions about women, Africa and artists.

“Dance is a lowly art,” Chipaumire says. “But the artist can have a vital and active role in society. So I’m trying to reiterate that the artist is a vital person.”

Indeed, her life could be seen as an embodiment of that vitality. An acclaimed solo choreographer and performer, Chipaumire, 46, grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia, one of four children of a poor single mother, as that country endured a wrenching civil war that overthrew the British-installed colonial government in 1980. She was the first in her family to go to university, graduating with a degree in law and thoughts of becoming an advocate for social justice.

Instead, she came to the United States, drawn by dreams of being an artist and by the inspiration she found in African Americans.

“Growing up, the only positive images I had of black people were of African Americans,” Chipaumire says. “All the other images Rhodesians fed us were of us as idiots. Muhammad Ali was a huge hero of mine, because he said ‘I’m black and I’m proud, I’m beautiful.’ So I had this huge idea that America was where black people were given a chance.”

She started out in New York, home of another idol, Spike Lee, and his alma mater, New York University. “I had no clue of what you had to do to be a filmmaker,” Chipaumire says. “But I had this independent hubris where I thought I could do anything.”

But hubris didn’t get her into film school, and she moved on to Southern California, where, still directionless, she tried a modern dance class. Though she was 28, an age when most dancers are at their peak, she took to dancing immediately. Moreover, she found a vehicle that fit her independent character.

“Compared to film where you need a huge budget and many people working, in dance you only need yourself,” Chipaumire says. “So it suited my personality because I liked doing things alone. And I quickly fell in love with the idea that a single voice could have an impact.”

In modern dance figures such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey and African-American Katherine Dunham, Chipaumire recognized the independence and strength of purpose she saw in her mother and aunts.

“Solo dances are also to me a political statement,” she says. “How much can this single voice be brave and strong enough?

“It was something about my war-liberation past, that you have to stand your ground, and something I also got from my single mother, that you have to do it, there’s no surrender. So there was something attractive to me about being a single person walking onstage, with no place else to look but me. It’s a dangerous, scary, exhilarating place.”

Chipaumire joined Urban Bush Women, the African-American dance group headed by Jawolle Willa Jo Zollar that’s acclaimed for its powerful, original pieces. She earned a Bessie, avant-garde New York’s equivalent of a Tony Award, for her work as dancer and associate artistic director with UBW from 2003 to 2008. (South Florida audiences may remember her fierce performance in the troupe’s Les écailles de la mémoire [The scales of memory] in 2008.) She won another Bessie for Chimaurenga, an hour-long piece about Zimbabwe’s civil war, from which she will perform an excerpt this weekend.