Teacher Coach: Chrissy Anderson-Zavala
A Xicana writer from Salinas, California, Chrissy studied and taught poetry in June Jordan's Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley, where she graduated with a dual-degree in English Literature and Peace and Conflict Studies. In Salinas, she tutored young people with a focus on youth activism and community violence prevention. She worked with WritersCorps for 3 years, teaching at Downtown High School, Everett Middle School, Mercy Services and the public library. She is currently completing her Master's in Education at Stanford University.

Frances Cachapero
Complete bio coming soon

Ruth Yafonne Chen Santoro
Yafonne joined Performing Arts Workshop in January 2005 as a Chinese Dance Instructor. She studies traditional wushu (Chinese martial arts) under grand master Ling Mei Zhang and trained for 5 years in contemporary Chinese dance under Lily Cai. Yafonne toured nationally with the Lily Cai Chinese Dance Company as one of its principal dancers from 1998-2002, and performed as a soloist with Unbound Spirit Dance Company and Dance Naganuma from 1996-1999. From 2003-2006, Yafonne worked as Editor-in-Chief for IN DANCE, a publication of Dancers' Group in San Francisco. She is also a Contributing Writer for Asian Week, among other publications, and now choreographs independently.

Artist Mentor: Matthew Clark Davison
Matthew landed in San Francisco in the late 80s as a teen-aged runaway and high school dropout. With no formal education, he began writing in response to the AIDS crisis, the context in which he came of age. After enrolling in Poetry for the People at Glide Church, he was encouraged by poets June Jordan and Janice Mirikitani to pursue a degree in writing. He eventually earned a BA and MFA from SF State's Creative Writing Program, where he is now a lecturer. His short fiction has appeared in Lodestar Quarterly, The Pacific Review, 580-Split, and The Atlantic Monthly's Unbound, and has been recognized with a Clark/Gross Novel-in-Progress Award and a Stonewall Alumnae Association Award. His current project, a novel called LETTERS TO THE DEAD, was awarded a 2007 SF Cultural Equities Grant. You can learn more about him at blog.matthewclarkdavison.com.

Lily Dwyer
Lily's fascination with movement and the body-mind-spirit connection began at an early age through a childhood spent dancing.  She received a dual degree in Dance and Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley and was awarded numerous honors and fellowships. Since graduating, Lily has been dancing with the acclaimed modern dance company, LEVYdance; teaching creative movement through Performing Arts Workshop; teaching dance at a women’s shelter in Berkeley; and teaching yoga at San Francisco Ballet, Berkeley Yoga Center, as well as to private clients.  Prior to her work with Performing Arts Workshop, Lily taught modern dance to underserved youth for three years as an ArtsBridge Scholarship recipient.

Teacher Coach: Aniefre Essien
Complete bio coming soon

Teacher Coach: Brooke Gessay
Brooke earned her B.A. in Dance and English/Creative Writing from Connecticut College, which also funded trips to Italy, China, and Vietnam where she did culture exchange through dance. She was a member of Malashock Dance for its 15th anniversary season, worked with the San Diego Opera in its staging of "The Pearl Fishers," and is now a member of San Francisco's LEVYdance. She has been teaching with the Workshop since January 2005.

Charles Gushue
Complete bio coming soon

Gift Harris
Gift is an actor with years of experience in film, television and local theatre productions.  Earning a degree in Arts and Humanities from Laney College in 1980, Gift went on to study acting with Jean Shelton, Ed Hooks, Glynn Turman and Eric Morris. After traveling around the U.S. and Europe doing plays with the New Shakespeare Company and Geese Theatre Company, Gift went back to school and completed studies at Cal State Hayward where he received his BA in Liberal Arts. He has worked as an Artist-in-Residence with the Oakland Ensemble Theatre and Opera Piccola and on numerous conflict resolution projects in the Oakland public schools. As a staff artist with Bay Area Arts Relief, he used theatre and dance games to help students who lost their homes in the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm. Since 1989, Gift has worked on and off with Performing Arts Workshop through both the Artists-in-Schools and Artists-in-Communities Programs.

Elizabeth Hille
Elizabeth is a writer and teacher living in San Francisco. She's a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars and has been published in GlimmerTrain, Mississippi Review and Quick Fiction, among others. In addition to Performing Arts Workshop, she teaches creative writing at the Academy of Art and is a mentor for Each One Reach One, a playwriting program in juvenile hall. Her film reviews can be found on GreenCine and Jaman.com, a film site dedicated to international cinema. 

Eric Hoffman
Experienced teaching children as a theatre instructor, entertaining them as an actor, and supervising them as a museum educator, Eric truly enjoys teaching children and is quite skilled.  He is entertained and inspired every time he is in the classroom and only wants to return the favor. Eric offers creative and enthusiastic instruction, lesson planning, program design, research and supervision skills developed as an instructor of children's theatre, museum educator, camp counselor. By teaching improv comedy, Eric has specialized knowledge of improv theatre games and other valuable techniques for teaching entertainingly and effectively. He has knowledge of diverse styles of instruction and understanding of diversity issues gained through living and working in varied educational settings.

Erica Jeffrey
Complete bio coming soon

Artist Mentor: Suraya Keating
Suraya Keating is an actress, teacher and therapist with an interest in the interplay between the creative arts and learning.  In addition to her work as an Artist-in-Residence for Performing Arts Workshop, she has also performed regularly with the cast of Tony-n-Tina’s Wedding and taught part-time at Santa Rosa Community College.  She completed her M.A. in Expressive Arts Therapy at the California Institute of Integral Studies and spends time at San Quentin State Prison leading theatre productions and working with inmates.

Nicole Klaymoon
Nicole received a Bachelors of Arts in dance from UCLA.  Her one-woman show, The Sixth Vowel, premiered at Miami Project Hip-Hop. Her other solo show Ms. Spellings of Be, was performed at the Illadelph Legends of Hip–Hop Festival in Philadelphia and the Electric Lodge in Los Angeles. She has performed spoken word integrated with dance in the La Pena Cultural Center Hip-Hop Theatre Festival, Hybrid Project, and the show Poejazzy at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland. Her choreography has been showcased at the Bootleg Theatre, Fruede, and was selected by the American College Dance Festival 2004 to be in the Carpenter Center Gala Concert.  She has collaborated with d. Sabela Grimes and performed in works directed by Rennie Harris, Marc Bamuthi-Joseph, David Dorfman, Maria Gillespie, and Meridith Monk.  In addition to her work at Performing Arts Workshop, she currently teaches dance and theater to adults and youth at Roco Dance and Fitness and Destiny Arts Center.

Tata Salah Kongo
As both a sacred and secular drummer, Tata is often sought to preside over religious ceremonies  as well as to facilitate community exhibitions, workshops and classes for both children and adults. Former musical director of Ayoluwa African Dance Company, Atlanta, Tata Salah Kongo has performed with professional West African Dance companies as both a solo and accompanist percussionist for the past fourteen years including: Barefoot Ballet of Atlanta, Spelman College Dance Department of Atlanta, Jeh Kelu African Dance Company of Burlington, M'Baiye Djiane of Buffalo, and Naby Bangoura of Oakland. Still using the first Djembe drum given to him by his father, Tata approaches his work with children in school communities using his pedagogical philosophy of fundamental listening. In leading youth to eagerly seek other environments that affirm critical thinking, Tata’s methodology demonstrates the capacity of human senses to discover beautyy in a given moment. Tata Salah Kongo has been privileged to have the opportunity to work with hundreds of youth from Pre K to Grade 12. Merging Kikongo, Kiswahili, Spanish and English words to create lyrics that beautifully accompany music created by students in his residencies and workshops, Tata Salah Kongo works with diverse youth in an effort to help each one recognize their own personal creative power as a source of renewable energy to fuel their work as agents of change within their families and communities. 

Suzanne Lappas
Suzanne is a professional dance performer and teacher enthusiastically engaged in learning diverse approaches to movement and the means of inspiring it. She has taught all ages through her experiences at Performing Arts Workshop, Roco Dance and Fitness, ODC School, and Indiana University. As a performer, Suzanne can be seen performing with MotionLab, Scott Wells and Dancers, the Lisa Townsend Company, and Liminal Touch. She has also performed with Annie Rosenthal Parr, Bliss Kohlmyer, Robert Moses' Kin, ODC Dance, Miguel Robles, the Butler Ballet, and Dance Kaleidoscope. She holds a BA in Political Science and French from Indiana University and a Certificat d'Etudes Politiques from l'Institut d'Etudes Politiques d'Aix-en-Provence, France.

Risa Larsen
Complete bio coming soon

Ada Liu
Ada was one of the principal dancers in Lily Cai's Chinese Dance Company in San Francisco at its inception in 1988. She is also a staff member of Chinese Cultural Productions and has worked as a dance instructor at St. Mary's Elementary School through the 1993-94 Prop J Cultural Equity Project. Credits include: the San Francisco Dance Festival, the Asian Pacific Performing Arts Festival, Theater Artaud Summertime Dance Project, The International Dance Festival in Germany, the Opening Performance for the Grateful Dead at the Oakland Coliseum in 1994, and Chinese Cultural Production's annual performances. Since 1994, Ada has worked as a Performing Arts Workshop instructor in creative movement and dance. She works in Performing Arts Workshop’s pre-school program and in classes with an ESL focus. Ada is fluent in Cantonese and Mandarin.

Sean Manzano
Sean Manzano nee Sean Manzano Labrador is an FBI—a Full Blooded Illokano, born in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He has done the institutional rounds: UCB, UCSC, SF State, and has an MFA in poetry from Mills College. His poetry appears in The Best American Poetry 2004 and in Bay Poetics. The literary worlds he introduces to a class are culturally, ethnically, linguistically, racially, economically dystopic and hazardous. In the classroom he approaches writing visually and architecturally. Using flowcharts, schematics, and architectural renderings of a poem’s outline and plan as a vigorous model for novice writers. Sean believes this is necessary to treat poetry and texts as sculpture—typographical sculpture, as a form of art, as stained glass. Part of learning this vernacular architecture is relocating class discussion to outside the classroom in order to experience one’s own setting.

Noah Martin
Noah comes to the Bay Area via Seattle, where he taught classes and camps with the Seattle Children’s Theater for 4 years. He joined Performing Arts Workshop in the winter of 2006 and has been thriving in the endlessly creative world of teaching Pre-K and elementary. In addition to Performing Arts Workshop Noah works with The Marsh and Cal Shakes. With the Marsh he spent a year in residence at Sanchez Elementary working with classroom teachers to integrate the performing arts into their science, reading, and writing curriculum.  As an artist, Noah prefers theater of the unscripted sort. He has trained with master artists Keith Johnstone and Mick Napier, as well as BATS, Jet City, Unexpected Productions, and The Unscripted Theater Company.

Artist Mentor: Delmance 'Ras Mo' Moses
Ras Mo, of African and Amerindian ancestry, is from Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean. He is a dynamic performance poet, drummer, recording artist, composer, theater director and teacher, and specializes in the use of performing arts for youth development, personal transformation, organizing, and participatory learning. In the Caribbean, Ras Mo trained artists, teachers, farmers, peasants, and women’s organizations to use popular education and theater for social change. In the US, he trained staff for many agencies and worked directly with inner-city communities, women and girls, and youth connected to the juvenile courts. Ras Mo currently teaches creative writing and electronic music production to teens. His latest project, “The Pink and Blue Arts for Violence Prevention Project,” includes a CD of original songs and performance poems to accompany curriculum modules, workshops and presentations on violence, gender, HIV/AIDS, drugs, teen pregnancy, cultural pride, and youth empowerment. Pink & Blue also includes a musical theater production, “Testify.” His website is www.rasmo.net

Stephanie Owen
Born and raised in San Francisco, Stephanie has been dancing her entire life. Dreaming of choreography since the Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul dance video days, Stephanie started her formal studies in her late teens. After graduating high school, she attended Skyline College, receiving an Associates Degree in Dance, emphasizing Modern, Jazz and Dance Education. Shortly after, she attended San Francisco State University, where she learned and studied other dance forms such as Congolese, Haitian, Ballet, and Dunham dance technique. She received a BA in Dance in 2003. Stephanie brings creativity in teaching and choreographing dance, especially within her first love, Hip Hop, in addition to performing arts work. Stephanie is a Creative Movement dance instructor at Dance Mission Theater and Hip Hop dance instructor for the Youth Program at Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. 

Teacher Coach: Kristin Papania
Ms. Papania has a B.A. in Spanish from the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR and a Teaching Credential from Holy Names University, Oakland, CA. She has numerous Master Level classes in English Language Development. Her area of expertise is literacy development through arts integration, to foster thoughtful observation and critical thinking skills. She has taught all levels from preschool through adults in Oregon and throughout the Bay Area. Kristin understands the arts are a powerful impetus for all students to develop self esteem and ways of analyzing their world, while honing critical thinking, speaking, writing and reading skills. She is currently a Senior Teaching Artist in Creative Writing and Arts, Literacy Specialist and Teacher Coach with the Performing Arts Workshop. She is also a Writing Teacher Consultant with the Bay Area Writing Project. Kristin has expertise and years of experience in literacy development and has worked with students of all ages and diverse languages, cultural backgrounds and literacy developmental levels. 

Sara Pfeifle
Sara is a Bay Area dance teacher, choreographer, and performer. She holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Montana and has taught a variety of dance forms to children and adults throughout the Northwestern United States. Sara has had the pleasure of working with Leyya Tawil's Dance Elixir, Pappas and Dancers, and continues to perform with Kelly Kemp & Co. and Aura Fischbeck. Most recently, she has started her own company, The Pfeifle Dance Project. In addition to her work with Performing Arts Workshop, Sara teaches for Fitness in Transit and Roco Dance and Fitness.

Scott P. Phillips
Scott began training in Chinese martial arts and qigong in 1977 at the age of 10.  He has been teaching students ranging in age from 5 to 75 since his early twenties and is currently on the faculty of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine (ACTCM). His teachers have included: Bing Gong, one of the first Chinese 'internal' martial artists to begin teaching in the United States. Scott has also studied extensively with George Xu, Zhang Xue Xin, Ye Xiao Long, Kumar Frantzis, and in Japan.  He has a scholarly background in Chinese History, Religious Daoism, and Ethnic Dance. Scott also spent many years training as a dancer and performer studying Modern, Jazz, Ballet, Congolese, Haitian, and North Indian Classical music and dance. He loves adventure, and when he is not teaching or cooking, he can be found kayaking in Alaska or Mountaineering in the Canadian Rockies.

Sonia Reiter
Sonia is a dance artist and teacher. She has collaborated in projects with choreographers Sean Dorsey/Fresh Meat Productions, Kathleen Hermesdorf/Motion Lab and Nina Martin among others. Currently she teaches dance and yoga to children and adults throughout the Bay Area and works part time at Dancers' Group, a local dancers' service organization.

Tedje Rose
Tedje has been a dancer, choreographer and teacher all her life. She teaches Brazilian dance at Mills College and has been a guest choreographer/teacher at the Harker School and the Marin School for the Arts. Trained in Amsterdam with an M.A in dance, she worked as a performer for circus Riboet, a traveling circus for children, and taught at the Vladimir school of Ballet. Coming to the United States, she continued as a Brazilian dancer and has performed with Daniela Mercury and Olodum. She joined the Workshop in 2004 and is currently the artistic director of Akat Dance, a modern dance company inspired by the life and natural movements of indigenous people.

Jason Sanford
Complete bio coming soon

Joti Singh
Joti Singh is the founder of Duniya Dance Company (DDC). Formed in April 2007, DDC creates dance that is a unique blend of Bhangra (a harvest dance from Punjab, India), Guinean dance from West Africa, and neither Bhangra nor Guinean dance. The company has performed throughout the Bay Area, including a performance for the Asian American Film Festival and the APAture Festival. Joti was one of four invited panelists for Dance Discourse, a project of Dancers' Group, CounterPULSE and Mary Armentrout. She wrote her Master's thesis on Bhangra in the South Asian Studies program at UC Berkeley and has traveled to Guinea, West Africa three times to study with master dancer Moustapha Bangoura, and other members of Les Ballets Africains. She was awarded an Apprenticeship with Alseny Soumah from the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and will be an Artist-in-Residence at CounterPULSE during the summer of 2008. Please visit www.duniyadance.com for more information on Joti and Duniya Dance Company.

Artist Mentor: Daisy Stoloff
At age 16, Daisy Celeste Stoloff was one of fifteen dancers to receive a three year scholarship to one of France’s top professional dance schools, The Superior School of Dance of Montpellier, where she was trained as a dancer, teacher and choreographer. Thanks to receiving Top Honors at graduation, she was invited to Greece as guest-choreographer and modern dance teacher at the Pre-professional Ballet School of Heraklio, under the direction of Claire Gouvianaki. Here, Daisy’s work rapidly achieved success, winning awards in national contests, and scholarships abroad for her students. In 2003, Daisy’s passion for dance, as well as travel, led her to the shores of San Francisco. Since her arrival, she has not ceased to develop her skills with Release Technique and Contact Improvisation, as a company member, with the Carmen Carnes Dance Ensemble, as a teacher on faculty at the Roco Dance School, developing dance curriculums, workshops and performance pieces for dancers ages 5 to adult, as lead artist and consultant for the Performing Arts Workshops and through the Dance Repertory Teacher’s Alliance, and as choreographer and co-director, training and managing “Body Language,” a modern dance youth group.

Amy Torgeson
Complete bio coming soon

Taylor Ullery
Complete bio coming soon

Jacinta Vlach
Jacinta is a San Francisco and New York based Dancer, Choreographer and Arts Educator. She received her formal dance training from SF School of the Arts, North Carolina School of the Arts, Jacob's Pillow, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. She has studied theater through American Conservatory Theater and the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. While in New York she danced in works choreographed by Roger C. Jeffrey, Reginald Yates, Sean Curran, Max Luna III, and Alvin Ailey. Jacinta has toured with many acclaimed companies including: Nathan Trice/ RITUALS, Robert Moses' Kin Dance Company, and Philadanco. She has presented her own choreography throughout San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Jacinta is a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Arts and Communities Innovative Partnerships Exploration Grant, a Theater Bay Area CA$H Grant, the Zellerbach Family Foundation Grant, and was recently named Resident Artist of San Francisco’s ODC Theater. In addition to her work at Performing Arts Workshop, she has served as a teaching artist and arts educator through SF Ballet Center for Dance Education, Children’s Aid Society, and substitution for Ailey Arts and Communities Program. Additionally, Jacinta has been on faculty at Contra Costa Ballet, the ODC Youth Program, SF Dance Center/ LINES Ballet and provided master classes for SF School of the Arts and Oakland School of the Arts.