Photo by Rick Chapman

Sherwood Chen is Associate Director of the Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA), and has worked in festival production, youth arts programming, arts grantmaking, and community arts, working for organizations including the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The San Francisco Foundation and the Music Center Education Division. As a performer, Chen has worked with artists including Grisha Coleman/Echo::System, Anna Halprin, inkBoat/Shinichi Iova-Koga, Amara Tabor-Smith, Oguri, Do Hee Lee, and Sara Shelton Mann. He was a resident member of Min Tanaka’s performance collective Maijuku in rural Japa. Chen leads Body Weather Laboratory movement research training originally developed by Tanaka. He currently serves as a member of the City of Oakland Cultural Funding Advisory Committee, and as a board member of Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, and Khmer Arts Academy in Long Beach / Phnom Penh.

Laura Elaine Ellis is a dancer, choreographer and producer. Presently, she is Executive Director of the African and African American Performing Arts Coalition (AAAPAC) – a San Francisco based, non-profit organization, founded in 1995 by a collective of artists looking to create better performance opportunities for and produce shows that reflect the aesthetic and cultural representation of Africans and African Americans. As AAAPAC’s executive director, Laura Elaine Ellis has co-produced successful events such as the Labor of Love Dance Series, The Quilt Project: Pieces of Me, and currently the Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now. The Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now is a community event of dance concerts, symposia, mentoring programs and workshops celebrating the legacy and artistry of African and African American choreographers.Funding awards for AAAPAC projects include: The Creative Work Fund, The Irvine Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, The San Francisco Foundation, the Walter & Elise Haas Fund and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.

Debbie Smith, Cultural Program Coordinator for San Francisco’s Arab Cultural and Community Center, has a Bachelor of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. From 2001 to 2007, Debbie worked for Dance Brigade’s Dance Mission Theater, a multicultural dance school and theater in San Francisco’s Mission district where she oversaw daily operations of the school and theater, as well as programming the theater’s spring and fall seasons and coordinating all aspects of production and publicity, serving dancers, choreographers, technicians and other artists from a wide range of dance styles and backgrounds. Currently she works full time at the Arab Cultural and Community Center on cultural program development, event management, grant writing, and publicity and marketing. She works with Arab and Arab-American performing and visual artists of all genres. An active member of the San Francisco arts community, she has participated in a number of panels and committees relating to dance, arts funding and advocacy, and other related subjects, in addition to both freelance and volunteer stage management, production assistance and consultation for a number of San Francisco artists and venues. Since 2005 she has been a member of Al-Juthoor Palestinian Folk Dance Company. She continues to read and study widely in the fields of dance history and ethnology, ethnomusicology, and performance studies.