People

Paloma McGregor is the daughter of a fisherman and a public school teacher. She is also a choreographer, writer, teacher and co-founder of Angela’s Pulse, which creates collaborative performance work rooted in building community and telling under told stories. Her work has been presented throughout New York, including at The Kitchen, Harlem Stage, EXIT Art, the Brecht Forum, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, Dixon Place and Bronx Academy of Art and Dance, as well as at UCLA, Yale University, The Dance Place in Washington, DC, Cleveland Public Theatre and the McKenna Museum in New Orleans. An eclectic movement-maker, she has choreographed a rollicking extravaganza honoring James Brown at SummerStages; the roving, multi-disciplinary closing performance of the Negritude exhibit at Exit Art; the emotional dance-theater adaptation of Patricia Smith’s collection of poetry, Blood Dazzler; and the multimedia opera-masquerade 4 Electric Ghosts. She is currently developing a new work, Building a Better Fishtrap, about water, memory and home, which will explore intergenerational exchange and environmental interactions. Paloma, who is originally from St. Croix, has toured nationally and internationally as a dancer, most significantly with Urban Bush Woman and Liz Lerman/Dance Exchange, and has taught workshops and master classes around the world. A former newspaper reporter and editor, she specializes in workshops on developing connections between dance and text and community building through the arts. Paloma earned her BS in Journalism (Florida A&M University) and her MFA in Dance (Case Western Reverse University).

Amara Tabor-Smith is a lecturer within the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. She teaches contemporary dance from an African diaspora dance perspective.
Amara is the former Associate Artistic Director and company member with The Urban Bush Women Dance Company. Currently she is the Artistic director of Deep Waters Dance Theater; an Oakland based dance company dedicated to making performance pieces that address issues of race, sexuality, discrimination, spirituality and the environment with the intent of inspiring social change. She is also the Co-Artistic Director of Headmistress; an international duet collaboration with movement artist Sherwood Chen. For more information visit: www.deepwatersdance.com

Her fondest food memories are her mother's seafood gumbo made every year on her birthday for many years, and her father making new year's blackeyed peas, neck bones, collard greens and cornbread for good luck!

Lisa Wymore is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Dance Program within the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance at UC Berkeley. She teaches courses in choreography, contemporary dance technique, performance, movement improvisation, and dance/technology. Wymore is currently the Co-Artistic Director with Sheldon B. Smith of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts; a dance-theater-performance group based in the Bay Area. Disappearing Acts makes bittersweet, multi-media dance-theater events that submerge the audience in rich theatrical worlds; exploring the unexpected beauty found within every day life. The company’s research has taken them from city street corners to the edge of the Grand Canyon in search of timeless stories of passion, fear, violence, and joy. From these investigations abstract narratives are built on a foundation of physical experimentation, improvisation, text, and sound. Wymore’s other projects include: creating distributed performances utilizing tele-immersion technology within the Z-Lab – a site for interactive real-time collaboration, see http://zlabucb.blogspot.com. Wymore is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst.

One of her earliest food memories: eating butter leaf lettuce grown in her mother's garden and picking off the little green worms.