Committee Members 2011-2012
Patricia Bulitt
Brook Byrne
John de Roy
Laura Elaine Ellis
Jenefer Johnson
Raquel López
Virginia Matthews

Dennis Mullen
Corrine Nagata
Paul Parish
Julie Potter
Renee Renouf (Hall)
Miguel Santos
Eric Espartinez Solano
Abby Stein
Ray Tadio
Hentyle Yapp

Biographies of the Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee Members for the years 2011-2012. For more information about the committee, read about our policies.

Patricia Bulitt is an interdisciplinary artist/dancer who has served for 10 years as Project Director for “Our Neighbors Dance Their Dance: A Celebration of World Dance” in association with the cities of Daly City and Berkeley. She received her M.A. from UCLA. Her numerous awards and fellowships include a National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, California Arts Council residencies, and the Outstanding Woman Artist Award from the City of Berkeley. Her work with improvisational dance and the making of site specific performances has been in association with Urban Creeks Council. Bulitt is a movement specialist at several schools and has been teaching creative dance/movement for over 20 years in California and throughout Alaska.

Brooke Byrne trained in Classical Ballet, Jazz, Tap, Musical Theatre and Modern Dance at Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, Melodia Arts Center and Bard College from which she graduated with a double major in Theatre and Dance.  Since moving to San Francisco she has performed with many Modern and Ethnic Dance companies and choreographers and served on the faculties of several Bay Area dance institutions. She is the Artistic Director of Khadra International Dance Theatre and in 2011 co-founded the Geary Dance Center in San Francisco.

Laura Elaine Ellis is a dancer, educator, choreographer, and producer. Currently, she is a principal dancer with Dimensions Dance Theater, and she is co-founder and executive director of the African & African American Performing Arts Coalition, co-presenters of the Black Choreographers Festival: Here & Now.Through AAAPAC, Ellis is presenting a new program – Men of Color Dancing – offering high-school and college students master classes, workshops, and networking opportunities with locally and nationally known choreographers and master teachers. Ellis is the Executive Director of the Young Saints Scholarship Foundation dedicated to awarding young performing artists the opportunity to train in pre-professional programs. She is on faculty of the Dance and Theater Departments at The Athenian School and California State University, East Bay.  Ellis has served on the advisory boards for SF Arts Education Project, Robert Moses’ Kin, and Stepology.  She has served on grant panels for Theatre Bay Area’s CASH Grant, the SF Arts Commission, and as an advisor for the HAAS Foundation.  She currently serves as a board member for CounterPULSE.

Raquel López studied flamenco dance in Seville, Spain with Matilde Coral and Rafael El Negro. She performed with Rosa Montoya’s Bailes Flamencos, Cruz Luna Spanish Dance Company, and was a soloist for many years with Los Flamencos de La Bodega at the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco. She was Artistic Director of El Cuadro Flamenco and the Raquel Lopez Flamenco Dance Ensemble. Raquel has been a guest lecturer in World Music and Dance at Sonoma State University and Golden Gate University. She served as Executive Director for Kitka and the Dance Brigade, and as Artist Liaison for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She also served on the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Dance Series and was Chair of the Izzies Committee in 1995. Raquel served as a grants review panelist for the City of Oakland and the California Arts Council and was on the City of Oakland Funding Advisory Committee. In 1998 Raquel received an Isadora Duncan Dance Award in Costume Design. Raquel has retired from performing, choreographing and teaching flamenco dance. She now devotes her time to designing flamenco costumes. She is currently the Chair of the Izzies Nominations Subcommittee.

Virginia Matthews began her dance career at Sarah Lawrence College under the mentorship of Bessie Shoenberg and trained at The Merce Cunningham Studio in N.Y.C.  She was a founding member of The Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. in San Francisco, and served as school director of The Margaret Jenkins Dance Studio.  She continued her professional career as co-artistic director of Dances for 1 and 2 which toured throughout the United States, Europe, Turkey and Israel. Founding her own dance company in 1983, she choreographed over 40 works which were performed throughout the S.F. Bay Area. Concurrently she taught dance at The College Preparatory School in Oakland from 1972 to 1994.  Since moving to Sonoma County, she has worked extensively with youth and adults at her dance studio, Downtown Dance/Art Space, The Santa Rosa H.S. Artquest program, Analy High School and The Sebastopol Community Center as well as guest performing and teaching at Sonoma State University.  She founded All City Dance, a teen dance company and created the 3Generations Dance Project, a multi-age performing company encompassing ages 8 to 60. She is also a founding member of SoCo Dance Theatre, an alliance of professional and pre-professional dance artists of Sonoma County.  Her critically acclaimed choreography continues to be performed in S.F., Marin, Sonoma and Mendocino counties. She has served on the Board of Directors of The Dance Coalition (the original S.F. Bay Area dance service organization) and was chairperson of The Isadora Duncan Dance Award Committee for 3 of the 5 years she served on the committee.  She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award for choreography.

Dennis Mullen is a Professor of Business at City College of San Francisco. He was the Izzies Chair from 2006 – 2009, and Co-Chair in 2005 and 2011. He has a background in ballet and currently sits on several non-profit boards. He has several oral history dance interviews in the collection at the San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design. He is currently serving as the Chair of the Izzies Committee.

Corrine Nagata has recently returned to the Bay Area and currently teaches Horton technique for the LINES/ Dominican University Bachelor of Fine Arts program. After attending San Francisco School of the Arts and the North Carolina School of the Arts, she graduated in the Advanced Placement Program. She spent eight years in New York teaching at The Ailey School, Dance Theatre of Harlem and for New York City Ballet’s Jacques D’Amboise. While in New York, she founded Nagata Dance which brings dance classes and performances into the public schools. Nagata Dance currently serves two schools in Harlem New York and five in San Francisco. Locally, Corrine has danced for Janice Garrett and Reginald Ray Savage.

Paul Parish, former Rhodes Scholar, writes for Ballet Review in New York and locally for San Francisco Magazine and for alternative weekly papers. He has taught dance criticism at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz and at the Silesian Dance Theater Festival in Bytom, Poland. He has studied ballet with Sally Streets and Debra Isaacson, Limón technique with Joan Lazarus, Cunningham technique with Ellen Cornfield, contact improv with Robert Funk and Sharon Tomsky, Sevillanas with Raquel Lopez, Lindy hop with Paul and Sharon and Belinda Ricklefs. He performed in Dance Brigade’s Revolutionary Nutcracker Sweetie for ten years.

Julie Potter is a dance artist, journalist, and arts manager contributing to publications including the San Francisco Bay Guardian, In Dance, Theatre Bay Area Magazine, Dance/USA Journal, with contemporary art festival coverage for Los Angeles’s pop-up newsroom Engine28.com and Portland’s Willamette Week. Potter is an Emerging Arts Professionals/SFBA Fellow, was a Fellow in the NEA Arts Journalism Institutes in both theater and dance, and awarded The Dance Critic Association’s (DCA’s) Gary Parks Emerging Writer Scholarship. In New York, Potter worked at The Juilliard School. She earned a B.S. in dance and arts administration from Butler University. Visit DanceFeast.com and juliecpotter.com

Renee Renouf has written professionally on dance in the Bay Area since 1960. Her credits include publications in the major metropolitan newspapers of the Bay Area during the ’60s and ’70s, plus The Christian Science Monitor, Dance News, Dancing Times, and Dance International. Her reviews of Asian classical dance have appeared in Hokubei Mainichi, Asian Week, and various English language newspapers published in Asia. A member of the Dance Critics Association, she currently writes for the Website ballet.co. She served on the organizing committee of A Ballets Russes Celebration, June 1-4, 2000, in New Orleans, which served as a basis for the Ballets Russes documentary.

Miguel Santos is a native Californian and Mexican American from Lompoc, Santa Barbara county. He studied ballet with Carmelita Maracci in college and then concentrated on Flamenco–working in the companies of Jose Greco and Lola Montes. In 1968, he joined Adela Clara’s Theatre Flamenco of San Francisco, where he has served as principal dancer, choreographer, Assistant Director, costume designer, program designer, and  Artistic Director. He is a three-time NEA choreographer recipient. Santos danced at the Old Spaghetti Factory in San Francisco’s North Beach for years. In 2006, he retired from Theatre Flamenco. For the past 10 years he has taught Flamenco at the Fair Oaks Elementary school in Redwood City, and in an after school program at the Martin Luther King. Jr. Community Center in San Mateo. Currently he is teaching at Khadra International Dance Center. In 2008, Miguel received two Izzie awards: Outstanding Achievement in Restaging/Revival/Reconstruction and Sustained Achievement. He also received the Malonga Casquelourd Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.

Eric Espartinez Solano is the founder of the Parangal Dance Company. Prior to founding Parangal he was a dancer and musician in Barangay Dance Company of San Francisco, serving as both Dance Master and Artistic Director. He has also performed with Kislap Sining Dance Troupe, Ramon Obusan Folkloric Group at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Magui Moro Master Artists, Ifugao Music and Dance Ensemble of Banaue and for KulArts’ Philippine Master Artist in Residence program.  He trained with Bayanihan, the Philippine National Folk dance company, renowned folk dance authority, Ramon Obusan, Philippine Normal University’s Kislap Sining Dance Troupe, and Maguindanaoan and Ifugao experts. A skilled teacher and mentor, he has choreographed for and taught over a thousand students for their Pilipino Cultural Night (PNC) at colleges throughout California. Mr. Solano has vast experience in researching traditional dances, music, and tapestry from the Philippines. He has done first-hand research with indigenous groups and Master Artists in the Philippines. As a result, three productions have been presented at the SF Ethnic Dance Festival: T’boli in 2006, two world premieres include Talaandig and Tagbanua in 2010, and Subanen in 2011 and the latest,  Kalilang of the Maguindanao, presented at Parangal’s show, Pamana.

Abby Stein has trained in modern, jazz, ballet, and tap and grew up performing dance and musical theater. Since moving to the Bay Area in 2003, she has been committed to studying, performing, teaching and producing belly dance in its many styles and related forms – from American fusion to Middle Eastern folkloric and everything in between. Her other dance passions include choreography, dance history and movement analysis. She graduated with honors from UC Berkeley where she double majored in Dance and Performance Studies and Near Eastern Studies. Awarded the campus-wide Haas Scholars Award for her honors research project and thesis on belly dance in the United States, Abby also received her department’s two highest awards for scholarship, the Ogden Undergraduate Prize in Theater History and the Julia Payne Memorial Award for Dance Scholarship. She works professionally in marketing, event production, arts administration and resource development for nonprofits. She also enjoys participating in UC Berkeley’s Dance Studies Working Group and volunteering in the dance community.

Ray Tadio trained at the Alvin Ailey School in New York and danced with the Ailey 2, Joyce Trisler Dance Company, and David Rousseve. He choreographed for the Ailey 2 Company, Requisite Dance SF, Pori Dance Co. of Finland, & National Ballet Academy of The Netherlands. He specializes in the Horton technique and was awarded the Le Huit d’Or in France in 1995 for excellence in jazz and contemporary dance. He is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.

Hentyle Yapp is a choreographer and was a professional dancer for contemporary companies in Taipei and New York.   He is currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley and holds a B.A. from Brown University, in French Literature & Premedical Studies, and a J.D. from UCLA School of Law, specializing in Critical Race Theory & Public Interest Law.