Joanie Block is the Artistic Director of SELMADANSE, founded in 2011 and named for her adored mother Selma. She has performed in work by Lis Fain, Nikki Hu, Benita Bike, Dorothy Hershkowitz, Yo-El Cassel and Jennifer Lin. She has also performed with teXtmoVes and The Elders Ensemble of Prometheus Dance. Her major productions include Dear Olivia (2012), Streaming Shabbat (2014), Emerge Dancing (2017) and Neither Here Nor There (2019) for the Across the Ages Dance Project. Joanie teaches Adult Modern Dance in Newton.

After 45 years as a clinical social worker, I now devote time to painting portraits and landscapes, with my family and nature as inspiration. Home is the center of my creativity, whether cooking, painting, writing or finding joy and peace in simply being present in our home. I wrote Bittersweet, A Memoir, in memory of our firstborn infant, Jesse, and also in tribute to my husband, Howard, our children, Aaron, Lili and Nate, and the possibility that grief, however bitter, can plant seeds of sweetness that flourish.

Andrea Blesso is an Arts Leader with over twenty years of experience creating and directing interdisciplinary programs and currently plays many roles in the arts ecosystem of New England, as Director of Dance & Interdisciplinary Arts at Boston Center for the Arts, Board member for Boston Dance Alliance and Arts Wayland, Dance Curator for multiple arts organizations, and Production Manager for Lynn Modell/Making Dances and Selmadanse. Throughout her artistic career, Andrea has performed with each of the elements - underwater, 18ft in the air, spinning fire fans, and in the mountains of Portugal, on tour with Snappy Dance Theater, Bennett Dance Company, Partners for Youth with Disabilities, and EgoArt Inc, among others.

IJ Chan (陳加恩) is a dance artist and educator from Boston, MA. She has dedicated her life to training and performing intensively in multiple dance genres and under many choreographers. In her own choreographic work, IJ is interested in intersecting and exploring the Asian-American narrative. She is committed to bringing quality performing arts instruction to low-income and minority youth populations within Boston. She also works as a freelance graphic designer, visual artist and seamstress.

For 4 young years, Eleanor Duckworth studied ballet in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with Irene Apinee, a WWII refugee ballet star from Latvia. Eleanor danced with the Halifax Gotshalks Ballet for two years. After a 43-year hiatus without dance, she started to study modern dance in Cambridge, in a class for people over 55, initiated and taught by Joan Green. Other teachers have been Margie Gillis, Julie Ince Thompson, Liz Lerman, Risa Steinberg, Diane Arvanites, Tommy Neblett, Andy Taylor, Mahala Beams, Lynn Modell, and various Gaga teachers. She was a member of Cambridge’s intergenerational Back Porch Dance Company, and also of Prometheus Elders and of Round the Corner Movers. She has performed with Margie Gillis, Ann Carlson, Bill Evans, Danny McCusker, Audra Cabaretta, Brian Crabtree, the Davis Sisters, Kelley Donovan, Meghan McLyman, Kathy Hassinger. Currently, she is a member of Back Pocket Dancers. She is retired from Harvard, as a Professor of Education.

Ken Field is a saxophonist & composer. He leads the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, an experimental & improvisational brass band, and is a longtime member of the electronic modern music ensemble Birdsongs of the Mesozoic. His solo releases document his work for layered saxophones and his soundtracks for dance and film. Field's music is heard regularly on the children's television program Sesame Street. He is the host of WMBR Radio’s “The New Edge”, former President of the Board of Tutoring Plus of Cambridge, Member of the HONK! Festival Organizing Committee, President of the Board of JazzBoston, and former member & chair of the Cambridge Bicycle Committee. Field was named a Finalist in Music Composition by the Mass Cultural Council.

Lynn E. Frederiksen is a hard-of-hearing modern dancer/choreographer and writer from St. Croix, US Virgin Islands. She holds a BA in Biology, an MA in Environmental Affairs, and an MFA in Dance. For 15 years she was on the Drama/Dance faculty at Tufts University and is currently adjunct professor of theater arts at Clark University. With Paul Kafka-Gibbons, she co-founded Lynn & Paul Dance to explore the possibilities of duets. She also studies Korean drum dance with Jennifer Lin and is a member of the 4:30 Collective. As a writer, Lynn co-authored Chinese Dance: In the Vast Land and Beyond (Wesleyan University Press 2016) and co-edited Dance Cultures Around the World, a multimedia college-level textbook (Human Kinetics, 2023). Her poetry and prose have been published in The Caribbean Writer, and her poem “Flowers” won the 2020 Worcester County Poetry Association contest.

Edie Hettinger, originally from Maine, decided to be a dancer at 10yo and only once briefly changed her mind. She earned her BFA in Dance Performance from The Ohio State University and has danced with many local, national and international choreographers in Columbus and Dayton, Ohio, Kansas City and Boston. She also enjoys occasional forays into theater work as an actress and choreographer. She considers herself lucky to be able to pursue her passion with Selmadanse and is grateful to her four children and husband Larry for their unwavering support.

Jason Jordan started his dance career at the tender age of seven when he won five dollars for being the best dancer at a Brooklyn house party. He has since danced with Feld Ballets/NY, Ballet-Tech, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal, Rubberbandance Co., Cedar Lake, Peridance Ensemble, Buglisi Dance Theater, FUKUDANCE, City Ballet of Boston, Dzul Dance, Armitage Gone, Lexington Ballet and Battery Dance. Mr. Jordan is currently teaching dance full time at Brighton High School.

Paul Kafka-Gibbons has been performing dance since he was a child. He has been dancing with Joanie for three years. This is his first performance with Selmadance.

Karen Klein's first career extended for 37 years as a member of the Faculty of Brandeis University, teaching in the English&American Literature Department, the Humanities and Women's Studies Programs. Before her teaching career, she had dance training with Martha Graham, the Limon Company, and Mary Anthony. Upon retirement, she began her second career as a contemporary modern dancer, performing for 15 years with Prometheus Elders Ensemble, 8 years with Across the Ages Dance, and as a writer of haiku and contemporary lyric poems. In 2016 she founded teXtmoVes, a poetry/dance collaborative with numerous performances in the Greater Boston Area, most recently in 2023 as the Klein/Murphy Duo with Sean Murphy. Her first full-length poetry book, This Close(IbbetsonStreetPress)was published in 2022.

Julie is a Dance/Movement Psychotherapist and Body- Centered Spiritual Director. She has taught at Lesley University for 30+ years. Julie has danced with Joanie Block, Selmadanse, Carol Sereda, Prometheus Elders and 4:30 Collective. She choreographed Passage: The Space Between Exile and Arrival and Imagining Talmud.

In many ways movement, healing the body, teaching and gathering others in community has been a thread that weaves through my personal and professional life. These are the elements that give me pleasure and purpose.

I have been a body oriented therapist and movement educator for 50 years.

I discovered a passion for dance in 2005 and trained in modern dance, ballet, hip hop and improvisational movement. I was a member of the modern dance company "The Elders Ensemble of Prometheus Dance,” (2007-2019) and co-founder and producer of "Across the Ages Dance Project” (2010-2019), hosting an annual show featuring an intergenerational ensemble of dancers.

Jennifer Lin, freelance independent dancer, teaching artist and choreographer, was born in Korea and raised in the American Midwest. Moving east, she earned a BFA from Boston Conservatory, engaged in a brief interlude in the NYC dance scene and returned to Massachusetts. A longtime cohort of the greater Boston dance community, Lin has danced with many local dancers, choreographers, and companies. As a mid-career artist, she went on to earn an MFA from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa with a focus on Asian and Pacific Island dance– particularly traditional Korean dance. She is author of Interstitial Space, an exploration of process driven choreography and a visual ethnography, Performing Korean-ness, a brief ethnography of MaryJo Freshley aka Pai mung-sa. Lin’s most recent project includes restaging a traditional Korean court dance to be performed at Arts at the Armory Thang and at Clark University.

Meghan McLyman is a professor of dance and the dance program coordinator at Salem State University. She holds degrees from Point Park University, American University, and Hollins University, is a Moving For Life Certified Teacher under Martha Eddy, and a Certified Evans Teacher under Bill Evans. Meghan and Kristen Duffy Young create and perform work under Accumulation Dance, as well as teach a contemporary dance series called Moving to Connect. Their work can be found on Instagram at @accumulation.dance and @moving_to_connect.

Jayne Murphy has been working in theaters for over 30 years. She has worked in Ireland, Russia, India, Venezuela, Ecuador, South Africa, and across the US with many different dance and theater companies. She toured internationally with the National Theatre of the Deaf for five years as interpreter and company/stage manager. In Johannesburg, South Africa, Jayne oversaw the construction of a new venue, The Dance Factory, which to this day is still the center of dance in the city. For six years, she trained township youth here on all aspects of theater work, giving many of them the skills that launched their own careers. Jayne has also worked at The Dance Complex in Cambridge, MA since 1993 in a vital management and maintenance capacity. A few of the many companies and choreographers Jayne has worked with and managed over the years include: Prometheus Dance, Nicola Hawkins, EgoArt, Danny Swain, Anna Myer & Dancers, Ipswich Moving Company/Jenny Carlson, Danny McCusker Dance, Wendy Jehlen/Anikai, Brian Crabtree, Marcus Schulkind, Christine Bennett, David Parker, Margot Parsons, Honey Blonder, and Karen Murphy.

Lynda Rieman grew up in the Boston area, studied dance and technical theater at Bard College, moved to NYC to dance, found a job as a puppeteer in NJ and then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1979 to co-found Zaccho Dance Theater, create the “Flying Project” and to study aerial trapeze with Terry Sendgreff. Her second job was with the ODC – Oberlin Dance Collective running lights and sound. The “career” as a “dance tech” took off from there; she toured the US with artists from CA on NPN grants from 1990-2006. Most of the work was created at Theater Artaud, ODC, Joe Goode Performance Space and Dance Mission. Moving back to Boston in 2007, she found a job at Boston University as the Assistant Coordinator of Dance. She has made a home here, again as a “dance tech” providing support in every way that she can (be it management, light design or rigging) to people making dances.

Melinda Rothstein started dancing at the age of three. While at Oberlin College, she was a member of the Oberlin Dance Company and also choreographed for and performed in student-led productions. She has been studying dance with Joanie Block since 2009 and has been performing with Selmadanse in productions of Dear Olivia, Streaming Shabbat, Emerge Dancing, and Neither Here Nor There (as part of Across the Ages Dance Project), From Darkness To Light, and in performances at the Newton Arts Festival. She and her husband, Andy, have three teen/young adult children. She has an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT and has many varied hobbies including baking, cycling, Pilates, and motorsports.

Joel Segel is a collaborative writer and a composer of prayer tunes. He co-authored two books with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: Jewish with Feeling, listed among Publishers Weekly’s Best Spiritual Books of the year; and Davening, which won a National Jewish Book Award. He is co-leader, with Mel Brown, of Shabbat by the Creek, a monthly word-of-mouth Shabbat gathering in Newton, Massachusetts.

Vicky Steinitz is a social psychologist, critical educator and political activist who taught at the College of Public and Community Service at U Mass/Boston for many years. She is a founding member of the Elders Ensemble of Prometheus Dance and she performed with the company for 15 years. Since retiring, she enjoys spending more time in dance classes, with her grandchildren, and at protest demonstrations.

Deb Stringham is dancer/choreographer/singer/actor who has taught and performed in both New York and the Boston area for almost 50 years, including Off Broadway, an international tour, numerous stock and regional productions and dance concerts. She recently retired from Bridgewater State University, where she taught dance for 19 years. In recent years she has worked with the wonderful Joanie Block ("Emerge Dancing" and teXtmoVes concert), and Julie Leavitt (Passage) and has presented her own work (Avian Triptych) at the Armory for the Arts. On the Cape, she was in "Wrinkles, the Musical" and the Cape Symphony’s production of Passport to America: The Immigrant Story. She is honored to be a part of this incredible production.

Andy Taylor-Blenis is an International Folk Dance (IFD) and Modern dance teacher and performer. Born into a dancing family, she began doing creative dance and IFD with her mother before the age of 3. She earned her BFA in Dance through UMass Amherst in 1983 and has taught and danced professionally in the Cambridge area for more than 40 years. She loves teaching dancers of all ages, from kindergarten through age 95+.

Nicole Ward is a filmmaker, sound & energy healer, and yoga practitioner living in Roslindale. She follows the mystery of communication in its many forms as a way to open up expansive dimensions of dialogue. She is currently grieving, creating, unlearning, weaving, loving, and dancing.

Olivia is an animator and filmmaker from and currently based in Chicago, IL. She recently graduated from the SMFA at Tufts in Boston, where she discovered her passion for the moving image. Her work aspires to be whimsical, a bit surreal, and comedic. She enjoys creating wacky and surprising narratives that are grounded in human emotion.

One of her favorite aspects of animation is bringing ideas to life through the limitless power of a single frame. She is so excited to have been a part of this beautiful project!

J Michael Winward (he/they) is an independent dance artist whose work takes place at the intersection of movement and memoir, memory and care. Michael is the director of Steps in Time®: an organization that brings social partner dance programs to assisted living & mind care communities. He is a lead coordinator of Dancing Queerly: a platform for LGBTQ+ dance & performance artist support. Michael has a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Bennington College, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College.

Lorel Zar-Kessler is totally grateful to Joanie Block for helping her continue to grow the joy of movement and dance in her senior years;. From early ballet and tap to years of modern dance with Nonny Burack and Dorothy Hershkowitz, Lorel has found joy in moving through space with her fellow dancers and feeling the beauty of both the physicality and spirituality of dancing through life.