Halifu Osumare is Professor Emerita of African American & African Studies at University of California, Davis. She has been involved with dance and black popular culture internationally for over fifty years as a dancer, choreographer, academic, administrator and scholar. Dr. Osumare has been recognized as one of the foremost scholars of global hip-hop, publishing The Africanist Aesthetic in Global Hip-Hop: Power Moves in 2007 and The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop (Palgrave Macmillan) in 2012.

Before her scholarly career, she was a dancer-choreographer and cultural activist. She was a dancer with the Rod Rodgers Dance Company of New York City in the 70s, and after returning to her native Bay Area, she became the Founder and Executive Artistic Director of Everybody’s Creative Arts Centre that morphed into CitiCentre Dance Theatre. This organization became one of the anchor tenets of what is now the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts.

As a dance student she studied Dunham Technique with Ruth Beckford in the 1960s, and went on to study with Katherine Dunham herself in the late 80s. Miss Dunham became her spiritual mother, as she produced the 1989 Stanford University Dunham Residency, and the Dunham in Hawai’i project in 1994. She is the former Co-Director of the Institute for Dunham Technique Certification that certifies new generations of dancers in Dunham Technique.

Dr. Osumare has chronicled much of this history in her two memoirs: Dancing in Blackness in 2018 and Dancing the Afrofuture: Hula, Hip-Hop, and the Dunham Legacy just published in 2024. Her vision of social justice is like Miss Dunham’s, who believed in the integration of the arts and the humanities to humanize all receptive souls.

Gina Pacaldo is a work in digression and a worker in progress. Gina is fulfilled and emptied while in the “never enough” micro work arena of public education. Amongst a “Beloved Community” of Students, Families and Colleagues, Gina practices listening, being an uplifter, a wannabe comedian and an “experience designer!” Pretending to be an archer like her first Granddaughter, Gina aims for the center over and over - working on being a “pointer and motivator” for each of us to see and do beyond ourselves – to care for ourselves and our nests. Believing we can be better Caretakers of our Planet Earth, our Communities, and our Relatives here and beyond. In the depths of El Gran Cañon, in and out of El Río Colorado, in shades of colored sky, Gina learns to swim, tend fire, cook, and carry on. 

Lizae Cervantes Reyes was born in the beautiful island of Cebu, Philippines and grew up in Metro Manila.  She has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for over forty five years.  She is a certified sound and music healing practitioner from California Institute of Integral Studies.  She studied with practitioners in the field of Integrative Medicine at the Institute for Health and Healing in Marin,  with focus on Healing Harp.  She plays Harp to offer comfort, inspiration and calm at the bedside of patients and meditation circles.

  She draws Inspiration from Ancestral memories and Ancient ways of story-telling.   As a multi-modality artist and ritualist,  she uses dance, myth,  storytelling and poetry  as a way to create sacred space for healing.  As a student of Indigenous Wisdom, she continuously travels to the Philippines to gain deep insights about her Indigenous roots.  She appreciates learning from Filipino Elders and Healers.  Her work is rooted in what she calls the Journey to Wholeness, where she recognizes everyone as co-journeyers and offers a quiet announcement to help open the inner doors, and to go even further...creating a swirling mass with no separations.

(Shoshone Bannock/Carrizo) is a lifelong activist. She is the Co-Founder of Sogorea Te Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led land trust based in the San Francisco Bay Area that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.