Ruth Torres is the Arts Integration Specialist for Local District South in Los Angeles Unified School District. She oversees the arts professional development of generalists and arts teachers for over 140 schools grades K – 12. Ruth was a classroom teacher for five years and an itinerant dance teacher for ten years throughout LAUSD elementary schools branch. During her time as a dance teacher she founded a Family Dance program at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in El Sereno, California. The program’s goal was to build community and bring parents and families to the school site.  Ruth is originally from Sinaloa, Mexico where dancing was part of the school curriculum and the culture of the community.  She joined the state performing arts school DIFOCUR and danced throughout Mexico and Europe for fourteen years bringing the dances of Mexico to other countries. Ruth also danced for Oscar Chavez at the Escuela de Arte Jose Limon in Culiacan. She has researched the dances, music and traditions of the Mayo-Yoreme indigenous group in Sinaloa and other ethnic groups of Mexico. Ruth strongly believes that dance is the most powerful form of expression and connection to the self, to others and to the world and that it should be an integral part of the curriculum in every child’s education. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Communications, a Master of Arts in Education, a Multiple Subject Teaching Credential, a Dance and Spanish Teaching Credential, and Administrative Services Credential. She has taken workshops in dance and movement therapy, creative dance, authentic movement and Bartenieff Fundamentals.

LEADERSHIP GOAL: to develop the skills needed to pursue district support for initiating a dance program for students, parents and their families that is provided through the school district because there is a need to create community at the school sites.

Rebecca Prather is a Speech-Language Pathologist and Arts Integration Coach with the Larkspur Corte-Madera School District.  She received her M.S. in Communication Disorders (2012) and an M.A. in Women and Gender Studies (2009) from San Francisco State University. As an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, Rebecca danced with the Middle Eastern Ensemble. Rebecca lived in Seville, Spain for three years where she studied flamenco and spent time in Cairo, Egypt where she studied folkloric and cabaret styles of Raks Sharqi.  She wrote her thesis for Women and Gender Studies on the representational politics of American Belly dance, “The Neo-Imperial Harem: Race, Gender, and Nation in American Belly Dance.”  Rebecca is passionate about the body as a cultural text and an agent of social interruption.

Over the past four years with LCMSD, Rebecca has taught arts professional development programs focusing on creative dance as a method of disability inclusion practices, movement and dance to support sensory and social self-regulation, autobiography and performance, community oral histories, and creative dance for narrative building.  She is a member of the Marin County Integrated Learning Specialist Program Advisory Board and the Alameda County ILSP Planning and Implementation Committee.  As a Communication Therapist, Rebecca specializes in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Alternative Augmentative Communication. Her commitment to using the arts is deepened by her experience raising a child on the autism spectrum and witnessing the transformative power of play.

LEADERSHIP GOAL:  to develop leadership and advocacy skills for dance within the arts integration movement by articulating and providing evidence for the uses of dance to support language development, abstract conceptual thinking, and social-emotional reciprocity practices.

Jennifer Oliver holds a B.A. in dance from University of California, Irvine, and a M.A. in Expressive Arts Therapy from the European Graduate School. Jennifer has choreographed and performed both locally and internationally receiving a Sator Arts Grant for her performance series Artful Happenings Abound!  As an educator and therapist Jennifer has provided creative dance education and artful practices for students and adults for the past 18 years. From 2005 – 2015 Jennifer served as the Associate Director for Young Audiences of San Diego where she co-founded and directed the Arts Education Resource Organization (AERO) and the Teaching Artist Institute of San Diego. Jennifer is the San Diego representative for the statewide initiative, Teaching Artist Support Collaborative and serves on the National Arts Education Council for Americans for the Arts.

LEADERSHIP GOALS: As I create a ten-year comprehensive dance and youth development curriculum for low-income students in North County San Diego,  I hope to receive critical feedback and support from my peers to help solidify my work, write and publish my thinking online and conduct workshops in support of dance in youth development for the local community.

Rosemary Hannon is a performer, choreographer and dance teacher. Since 1996, she has taught a variety of dance forms, improvisation and composition throughout the San Francisco Bay Area at dance studios and schools and for non-profit arts organizations. Rosemary has also been teaching Contact Improvisation since her first collaboration with Vitali Kononov in 2004 at the American Dance Festival including at the West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival and Jam, CounterPULSE, ODC School, Eighth Street Studios, Finnish Hall, Sierra Contact Festival and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. In 2004, Rosemary completed her MA in arts-integrated teaching from University of San Francisco. From 1996-2005 she taught music and dance in public elementary schools for Young Imaginations, an arts education non-profit and from 2005-2007 she was on the faculty of Luna Dance Institute and managed their studio dance program. Since 2007, Rosemary has been teaching dance at Cragmont Elementary in Berkeley Unified School District. She teaches stand alone, standards-based dance for all grades and works with classroom teachers at Cragmont to integrate dance into other core subject areas.

LEADERSHIP GOAL: Working with this cohort will help me to articulate dance goals (for both in-person advocacy and for writing articles and grants) at the school, district and larger dance education community level in order to help create a more comprehensive district-wide dance program in Berkeley Unified.