Rosemary first encountered Luna through founder Patricia Reedy when they were introduced at a Bay Area arts education providers’ meeting in the early 2000s. At the time Rosemary was already a well-seasoned teaching artist, having taught music and dance in public schools through the arts education non-profit Young Imaginations since 1996. Luna’s child-centered approach to creative dance education inspired her own teaching practice, and she found that the practical and theoretical training she received through Luna’s Professional Learning workshops complemented her degree in arts-integrated teaching. Rosemary is woven into Luna’s history and continuing legacy as a past faculty member 2005-07, as a Summer Institute alumna, and now as a colleague and fellow expert in the field.

A prolific artist and committed educator, Rosemary addresses her own creative identity by becoming actively involved in many facets of the Bay Area dance scene. From organizing dance events that build community, to cultivating much needed East Bay arts spaces through studio management, Rosemary, like many dancers, does a little bit of everything. But she has been most lauded for her choreography – her piece Gallus Gallus Domesticus was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award in 2013 – and for her teaching – she was recognized as an Outstanding Educator for Berkeley Unified School District in 2014.

Since 2007 she has been teaching standards-based dance at Berkeley’s Cragmont Elementary, where she also collaborates with classroom teachers to support the integration of dance into other core subject areas. Selected as one of Luna’s Leadership Cohort in 2015, Rosemary focused her inquiry on articulating dance goals to build a more comprehensive district-wide dance program in Berkeley Unified. She is a well-known local Contact Improvisation and Axis Syllabus teacher-candidate and the somatic inquiry of both practices inspires her investment in anatomy, biomechanics and physics. She continues “to be curious about the intersection of creative process and somatic inquiry” and how that manifests through technical training. She credits Luna for how she organizes her dance lessons and units. “The arc generally follows creative process cycles – exploration, improvisation, composition, performance, reflection.”

Rosemary’s long term impact on her students is clear from this story: Last year I was inspired by a student I had worked with who entered a grade level that I wasn’t teaching. He loved dancing so much he started choreographing a dance for his whole class. His teacher followed his lead and helped the class practice so that they were able to perform his dance at one of our school assemblies.