Leaders

Bhumi B Patel is a queer, desi artist/activist, dance scholar, and director of pateldanceworks (she/they). She earned her MA in American Dance Studies from Florida State University and her MFA in Dance from Mills College. Bhumi is currently a doctoral student at The Ohio State University. Patel’s creative performance work has been presented at SAFEhouse Arts, max10, Summer Performance Festival, RAWdance's Concept Series, The San Francisco International Arts Festival, Berkeley Finnish Hall, PUSHfest, Shawl-Anderson’s Queering Dance Festival, and Deborah Slater’s Studio 210 Residency. Bhumi was a 2017-2018 Emerging Arts Professionals Fellow and a 2019 Women of Color in the Arts Leadership through Mentorship Fellow. She has presented her research at the Dance Studies Association Annual conference and the Popular Culture Association Annual conference as well as having been published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Life as a Modern Dancer, Contact Quarterly, and InDance. pateldanceworks.org

Raissa Simpson is a scholar/artist and artistic director of the San Francisco-based PUSH Dance Company. Her award-winning choreography is at the intersection of racial and cultural identities and centers around discourse on the complex experiences of racialized bodies. Her interest lies in the body as a site for racial discourse alongside new media and technology. She is author of Writings On Dance: Artistic Reframing for Celestial Black Bodies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), which offers considerations on how Afrofuturism is staged in contemporary theater. pushdance.org

Gerald Casel (he/they/siya) is a Bay Area-based dance artist, equity activator, and antiracist educator. As director of GERALDCASELDANCE, his choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. Casel is an Associate Professor of Dance and is the Provost of Porter College at UC Santa Cruz. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from UW Milwaukee, they received a Bessie award for sustained achievement. Casel founded Dancing Around Race, an ongoing community engaged-participatory process that interrogates systemic racial inequity in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. geraldcasel.com

Yayoi Kambara has been a Bay Area dance artist since 2000. KAMBARA+ was founded in 2015 as a vehicle to produce her choreography, focusing on creating dance performance experiences that cultivate a sense of belonging. IKKAI means once: a transplanted pilgrimage is commissioned by the San Jose Japanese American Citizens League and will premier in 2023. IKKAI shares experiences of those illegally incarcerated during WWII and dares to dream of a collective future where this kind of injustice will never happen again. Kambara is the lead artist for this project funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Hewlett 50 Award. kambaraplus.org

David Herrera (he/him) is a Latinx choreographer and community leader. He is the Artistic Director for David Herrera Performance Company (DHPCo., 2007) in San Francisco. DHPCo’s mission is to ignite change in the dance field by centering Latinx experiences and communities as performers, leaders, creators, educators, participants, scholars, and audience. David has also launched two community impact programs: LatinXtensions mentorship and Latinx Hispanic Dancers United. Both programs provide community, resources, and opportunity to the greater national Latinx dance community. He currently sits on the Isadora Duncan Awards Committee, is a founding member of Dancing Around Race, and serves as advisor to the Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers. David is a 2021 National Association for Latino Arts and Cultures Leadership Institute Fellow. dhperformance.org