2024-2025 Committee Members
Agpalo Makinta (Ting)
A Dance Practitioner, Healer, and Artist, Ting uses their art as a form of visual and oral storytelling like ancestors before them have done, and instills a holistic and spiritual approach to all forms of dance. With an extensive background in root work, as well as being a mammadto and mangngagas, Ting is also deeply entrenched in historical work documenting family history and precolonial Ilokano culture, all while learning about living cultures. With a long history of involvement in the ancestral arts, as well as fine arts, Ting’s goal is to create a safe space for all artists and ancestral practitioners, hoping to continue pushing living cultures forward while also embracing innovation in all art forms.
Andréa Spearman
Andréa balances life as an Artist and Arts Administrator. As Artist Resource Manager, she supports artist-led community development work, and increases visibility for dance artists, locally, nationally and internationally. She has also served on granting panels for Dancers' Group, California Arts Council, and an artist relief fund led by Dancers' Group, Theatre Bay Area and InterMusicSF.
For 20+ years, Spearman has been a student, teacher, choreographer, and performer of a variety of modern-based movements. She creates works that draw on a diverse set of deeply rooted cultural traditions and an eclectic mix of styles.
Her latest endeavor, The Black Landscape podcast, highlights Black SF Bay Area leaders, emerging and established.
ChingChi Yu
ChingChi Yu was in LangLing Theater before relocating to California from Taiwan in 1986. She’s had the honor of dancing in works by many Bay Area choreographers and is a founding member of Dandelion Dance Theater. In January 2023, she joined Dance Generators. ChingChi discovered choreography as a dance student at UC Berkeley, and upon graduating joined Asian American Dance Performances as a resident choreographer. Her work has been presented throughout the Bay Area. ChingChi’s work is theatrical and usually has an emotional component. Her theater experience greatly influenced her choreography, which uses theatrical imagery, facial expressions, and intriguing character interactions to express a potently wide range of emotions and human experience. Awards: City of Berkeley Civic Arts Grant. SADC Frank Shawl Residency.
David Henry
David has had a diverse professional dance career. He came to Berkeley and entered the folk dance world in the 70s. Touring nationally with Khadra International Folk Ballet and in Europe with Westwind International Folk Ensemble. He breached out into ballroom dance, and has been teaching American and International Ballroom style dance ever since. Exploring modern dance while studying at Cal, this eventually lead him to ballet. He was a member of many local companies ,Berkeley Ballet Theater, Peninsula Ballet Theater, Solano Civic Ballet, Palesch Pacific Ballet, Oakland Ballet ,as well as Tuju Tasksu (an improvisational masked theatre company) and Omega West, a liturgical dance group. Still active in the dance world, David is also accomplished yogi.
Dennis Mullen
is a former Chair and member of the Izzies from 2003 to 2016. He was a soloist with the Santa Clara Ballet, and a former board member of Alonzo King's LINES Ballet. He has several oral histories published and in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design. Currently, he is a Professor of Accounting and International Business at City College of San Francisco.
Garth Grimball
Garth(he/him) is a dance artist and writer based in Oakland. He has danced with Oakland Ballet, Asheville Ballet and Dana Lawton Dances, and performed in works by Merce Cunningham, Mel Wong, Molissa Fenley, Brontez Purnell, Brenda Way and Salvatore Aiello. His writing has appeared in In Dance, Dance Magazine, Dance Teacher Magazine, and the SF Examiner. He is a critic for the website Life As A Modern Dancer. He is the editor of ODC's Dance Stories.
Jamie Wright, Chair
Jamie is a former musician with a BA in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA in Marketing from University of San Francisco. He has served on the Board of Directors of Robert Moses Kin and Push Dance Company since 2006. His company, The DanceWright Project, has been presented at: the Black Choreographers Festival/Here and Now; 24 Views and the Pilot Program at ODC Theater; Collaborations! Dance: Music at the Cowell Theater; and in four seasons at Dance Mission. He has been commissioned to create works for And Still Dancing and the Opera Frontiers. In 2012 he choreographed for the world première of Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, by author Anne Rice.
Katy (Katherine) Warner
Katherine Warner is a founding member of Alonzo King Lines Ballet. She also danced with San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Dance Spectrum, Zaccho Dance Theater, San Francisco Opera, and Santa Fe Opera. Katherine has been honored by the Isadora Duncan Awards for Outstanding Contribution as a Dancer. Katherine graduated Magna Cum Laude from SF State University, with a degree in Child/Adolescent Development. Ms. Warner taught with Alonzo King Lines Dance Center and the Lines Educational Programs.
Missy Kim
Missy Kim’s ballet journey began in 2014 at Santa Clara Ballet in an adult beginner class where she fell in love with the exercise and art form. Since that first class she has performed in SCB’s Nutcracker party scene, and volunteered in costumes, ticketing, social media marketing, fundraising, and more. Missy has served on Santa Clara Ballet’s board since 2015. In 2023 she was San Jose Dance Theatre’s Nutcracker Prop Master.
Paul Parish
Paul is the dance critic for the Bay Area Reporter, the nation’s oldest gay weekly. He’s covered dance for 35 years, writing for local alternative papers and for Ballet Review, Dance Magazine, Ballett Internazional/Tanz Aktuelle, and The New Yorker. He studied English at the U of Mississippi and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and left the PhD program at UC Berkeley to study ballet with Sally Streets. He’s also studied West African, Limon, Cunningham, contact improv, Pilates, and Lindy hop. He has performed with the dance Brigade and Remy Charlip. He teaches at the Beat and at the Downtown Berkeley YMCA.
Susan Melville
Susan’s love of dance started in the Philippines where she received her first dance training in Luigi Jazz and ballet. When she came to the United States, she continued to study dance in diverse styles such as modern, Broadway jazz, Flamenco, dance teacher training and more. She was very fortunate to be able to train with Bay Area teachers Yaelisa, Inna Bayer, Karen Morell, to name a few. In addition to performing and teaching children's dance classes, Susan has greatly enjoyed attending countless dance performances over the decades living in the Bay Area and is greatly looking forward to using these experiences as a member of the Izzies.