LIZZ ROMAN- Artistic Director of LIZZ ROMAN & DANCERS (LR&D) has been a dancer and choreographer in San Francisco since 1984. “The dance is the sum of the journey we take through a site,” states Roman. "In the words of LeCorbusier, 'To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.' I seek guidance from each building I collaborate with,” continues Roman. “I create a visual history of our physical journey through that space that becomes a dance. It is driven mainly by the architecture of the space.”

Roman and her company have been making dances in San Francisco's dance spaces, local theaters, and outdoor festivals since 1995. The work has been described by critics as “Eloquent”, “Breathtaking”, “Provocative”, and “Captivating.” LR&D are best known for their trademark expansive dances that spring, roll, and fly through buildings, resulting in an Isadora Duncan Dance Award (IZZIE) for outstanding choreography in 2013 for "DEEPER: Architectural Meditation at CounterPulse" (2012), and a IZZIE nomination for Best Company Performance for CELLGROUND (2005). The company has developed innovative site-specific techniques to work in unique and commonplace locations with a variety of multi-media collaborators and scenic elements. WaterSaw, Roman's most recent music collaborators received an IZZIE Award for Original Music score for 2012's "DEEPER." The SF Butoh Festival and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival commissioned Roman to create a site-specific dance, which premiered at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2005, and was remounted again for the 2006 festival season. In 1998, Roman and filmmaker Kevin Cunningham received the SF WEEKLY Black Box Award for Cross-Genre Performance for "IN HER DREAMS."

LR&D's most recent project "FIFTY FIVE SIX", created for and performed at the electricians union building at the corner of Fillmore and Hermann in SF, was commissioned by SF Trolley Dances and performed as part of their 10th Year Anniversary Season in October 2013. Roman has also created site dances for Theater Artaud (Z SPACE), ODC Theater, ODC Commons Rooftop, Dance Mission Theater, CELLspace, The Jewish Community Center of Palo Alto, Danzhaus, and CounterPulse. Roman currently teaches modern dance technique in SF at ODC Dance Commons, where she is also a choreographic mentor for ODC’s emerging artists program, PILOT. Other teaching credits include SF Dance Center and the University of California, Berkeley.

Before moving to SF in 1984, Roman lived in Chicago where she studied theater at the Goodman School of Drama. She attributes much of her choreographic style to her years as a student and performer of improvisational theater and dance in Chicago and St. Louis. Roman is also a certified Pilates instructor and currently is co-owner of PARKSIDE PILATES LLC in SF.

 

DIANE FRANK- After completing a B.F.A in Theater (Ohio University) and an M.A. in Dance (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana), Diane Frank taught for four years in the Dance Department at the University of Maryland, where she was a founding member of the Maryland Dance Theater. She then moved to New York City to begin an eleven-year career with Douglas Dunn and Dancers, touring nationally and internationally. As a scholarship student, she was invited by Merce Cunningham to join the teaching staff of the Merce Cunningham Dance Studio, where she taught for eight years. At Cunningham’s request, she taught both technique and repertory at the American Center’s Atelier Cunningham in Paris. A frequent guest teacher at the Paris Opera, she assisted Douglas Dunn in both the creation of new work for the Opera and the setting of established repertory. Frank has been the recipient of seven NEA Choreography Fellowships for collaborative choreographic projects with Deborah Riley, as well as commissions from the Jerome Foundation, DTW, Dance Bay Area, and Meet the Composer, and Arts Silicon Valley. Her work has been performed both in the United States and abroad.

At Stanford since 1988, Frank teaches intermediate and advanced modern technique, choreography, and mentors graduate and undergraduate student dance projects. She organizes and advises Stanford’s student participation in the American College Dance Festival as well as other Divisional dance education and performance projects on- and off-campus. She is the Co-Director of the Dance Division's annual concert. She also organizes numerous choreographic commissions by guest artists for Stanford student dancers, frequently acting as Rehearsal Director, setting and maintaining works by choreographers as diverse as Elizabeth Streb, Holly Johnston, Brenda Way, Parijat Desai, Hope Mohr, Janice Garrett, among others. In 2005, she played a significant role in the development of Stanford Lively Arts’ campus-wide interdisciplinary arts event “Encounter: Merce,” organizing its “Music and Dance by Chance” commissions, as well as an IHUM lecture series on Cunningham’s video dances and concert repertory. She has twice taught Cunningham repertory in Stanford workshop classes.

Frank has been instrumental in developing a number of residency projects and artistic collaborations for the Dance Division. Highlights include: the repertory reconstruction project of Anna Halprin’s "Myths"; Hope Mohr's "Under the skin," a collaborative performance project bringing together artists, physicians and residents from the Medical School, and community performers; Elizabeth Streb's "Crash" performed with Streb's company on Stanford's Memorial Auditorium stage; and "Cantor:Rewired," site-specific outdoor iterations of Parijat Desai's work fusing Southeast Asian classical Indian dance with post-Modern choreographic strategies. Originally performed throughout the galleries and grounds of Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, this work was most recently performed at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum in May 2010. in Spring 2010, she assisted Ann Carlson in the organization of her walking performance event, "Still Life with Decoy". In 2011, she is assisting in the reconstruction of Anna Sokolow's signature masterpiece, "Rooms". Frank also teaches “The Duets Project,” a performance class that examines partnering through duet repertory. Strongly interested in site-specific performance, Frank has taught the theory course “Figure/Ground: Site-Specific Dance Performance in Outdoor Environments.” Complementing this course, she conceived and organized "Red Rover," a series of commissioned site-specific dance performances traveling the grounds of Stanford campus. Frank instituted and currently directs the Firework Series, a quarterly informal showing of student work followed by discussion among artists and audience. She also conceived and organized the Bay Area Dance Exchange, a day-long intensive hosted by Stanford for Bay Area college and university dance programs; eight schools gather to share studio practices, creative processes, and performances of works. Frank's recent choreography includes the site-specific duet "Cleave," from which she developed a video dance with film maker David Alvarado, as well as "Sea Change," a series of duets. Her current work, "Twilight Composite" will be performed at the American College Dance Festival in March 2012. Frank is a frequent guest teacher at Bay Area dance studios, colleges, and universities. A strong proponent of arts education, she consults and volunteers in the development of dance and live arts activities for public schools and the community. She has also directed the Dance Division’s summer dance intensive for high school students through US Performing Arts.

 

KARA DAVIS- Davis began her career performing with several ballet companies including Ballet Met, Atlanta Ballet, Ohio Ballet, the San Francisco Opera Ballet and Ballet Jorgen in Toronto, Ontario. For the past twelve years she has lived in San Francisco and has danced for a variety of contemporary companies and independent choreographers such as Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Pearl Ubungen Dancers & Musicians, Mary Carbonara, Robert Moses, and Kathleen Hermesdorf. She is a founding member of KUNST-STOFF and Janice Garrett & Dancers. She won an “Izzie” in 2004 for “Outstanding Achievement in Individual Performance” for “her season” as a Bay Area free-lance artist. Along with naming Ms. Davis as San Francisco’s “MVP” for 2005, Rachel Howard of the SF Chronicle describes Davis’ choreography as “sculpturally exquisite and shape-shifting” full of “emotion that never feels manufactured, overearnest or forced”. In 2006 she formed project-agora with friend and colleague Bliss Kholmyer Dowman (www.project-agora.com), a curatorial organization that produces interdisciplinary collaborations involving artists who both challenge and compliment each others’ aesthetics. Davis has taught at the Atlanta Ballet School, Berkeley Ballet, SF Ballet School, San Francisco Dance Center, Alonzo King’s Lines Pre-Professional & BFA Program, and ODC children’s program. Since September 2006 she has hosted a dancer/musician improvisation jam that brings the dance and music communities together to explore different modalities of improvisation. The jam has been featured on SPARK over the past year. Ms. Davis has recently been rewarded the CHIME Artists in Mentorship residency with Bay Area choreographer Alex Ketley for 2009. She was also selected to be an artist in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts for Fall 2009. (Photo credit: Breton Tynor Bryan).

 

BRIAN FISHER-Brian Fisher earned a BFA in dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and spent the next decade in New York working with a variety of choreographers including Doug Varone, Rosalind Newman and Igal Perry. During that time he also performed on Broadway in La Cage aux Folles and toured with a variety of shows. In 1992 he joined ODC Dance San Francisco where he stayed for 15 years. He has performed as a guest artist for various Bay Area choreographers including Robert Moses, Sonya Delwaide and Sally Streets. Brian continues to enjoy longtime associations with Sean Dorsey Dance as well as the Mark Foehringer Dance Project San Francisco where he has served as a performer, teacher, and rehearsal director. He was honored to receive the Isadora Duncan Dance Award. Brian has taught contemporary technique for Berkeley Ballet Theater, the Lines BFA program through Dominican College, Teen Dance Company, and served as a guest lecturer for the dance department at Stanford University. He is currently on faculty at the ODC Teen Dance curriculum, as well as the Conservatory for Contemporary Dance Arts.

 

MARK FOEHRINGER- Over the past 39 years in the dance industry, Mark Foehringer has created a dance organization, directed two pre professional dance programs and made works for dance companies and dance programs, directed operas and developed collaborative projects with musicians and other artists. He is a producer, presenter, director, teacher, choreographer and mentor. Foehringer is an internationally active choreographer and dance educator who has directed his San Francisco based contemporary dance organization, Mark Foehringer Dance Project | SF (MFDP|SF), since 1996. He choreographed and taught throughout the US and abroad, working with organizations that include: Rambert School of Contemporary Dance in London, Ballet Nacional del Peru, Ballet San Marcos of Lima and Cisne Negro Dance Company of Brazil. Outside of Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, Foehringer’s company has been seen in Aruba 1997, NYC 1999, 2000, 2005, 2012 and 2014, Peru 2007, 2008, 2012, 2013 and 2015.

He launched Conservatory for Contemporary Dance Arts (CCDA) in 2013, a training program for dancers ages 14-18 who are focused on a college dance program or a professional dance career. In addition, he curates and presents Dancing in the Park SF, a large scale outdoor dance event every spring featuring dance companies from around the Bay Area. His work has been supported by San Francisco Foundation; Fleishhacker Foundation; Zellerbach Family Fund; Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund; Fort Mason Center Presents; Helen Bing Music Series; Arts Council Silicon Valley; California Arts Council; Council for International Exchange of Scholars; Peninsula Foundation; Valley Foundation of Silicon Valley; Center for Cultural Innovation; School of Music and Dance of San José State University and US Public Diplomacy Program.

Foehringer received two Fulbright fellowships to lecture and set work in Peru in 2007 and 2012. He returned to Peru in 2013 on Specialist Grant through Council for International Exchange of Scholars. Beyond work for dance companies and university programs, Foehringer has worked with Festival Opera, West Bay Opera, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Children’s Creativity Museum of San Francisco. Foehringer directed opera productions of Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Gounod’s Faust, Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and most recently Verdi’s “La Traviata” for Festival Opera of Walnut Creek. He held the positions of Artistic Director and resident choreographer at Western Ballet in Mountain View, CA for 10 years. During his directorship he increased the student body; designed the new home for the school; authored a student handbook; developed an 8 level training program for youth and 4 level program adult students; created 4 a show season with a strong classical and contemporary repertoire.

Foehringer grew up and started dancing in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He went on to train and perform in New York, London and San Francisco.  In 1977, he joined Cisne Negro Dance Company with whom he toured throughout South America and Europe for 10 years. In addition to directing MFDP|SF and CCDA, Mark is adjunct faculty at San José State University.