The Ladies
GUILIANA BLASI
Giuliana (she/her/hers) is a mama, dancer, writer, facilitator, and survivor. She is incredibly grateful for the training, guidance, and mentorship she has received from deeply talented teachers, choreographers, and community leaders across the Bay Area. Mix'd Ingrdnts has been her dance home since 2010, from where she grew and developed as a performer, teacher, and forever student.
Currently, she loves taking Heels classes and is a joyful dancer with Raio de Luz samba team. At this stage of her creative life, she focuses on utilizing movement, poetry, and storytelling for healing and thriving. Giuliana has over a decade of experience working with transformative organizations as a teaching artist, program leader, fundraiser, and grant writer; she is especially drawn to supporting artists doing work in service of creativity, equity, and liberation.
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GAIL BURKS
Gail “G-Funk” Burks is a Bay Area-based performing artist and educator who hails from Chicago. Mainly specializing in Waacking and Locking, she entered the Bay Area street dance scene in 2012 and proceeded to learn from various pioneers/leaders within those styles. Gail has performed, battled, choreographed, and taught in the States and internationally along with placing in competitions such as Freestyle Session LA, Vancouver Street Dance Festival, Juste Debout USA, and Hualien B-Boy City. She was also the winner of the Tacos & Turntables Waacking category in 2014. Gail has additional experience behind-the-scenes as an event organizer such as being one of the lead coordinators for Mix’d Ingrdnts’ Waackers of the Galaxy jam in 2016.
Her credits include Bae Rooted Waacking Committee, Bay Area Lady Lockers (BALL), Full Out Studios, Rae Studios, workshop instructor at UC Berkeley, featured choreographer for Bliss Dance Festival 2021, All The Way Live Taiwan 2019, Duniya Dance & Drum Company, and many more!
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MARINA STANKOV-HODGE
aka NURSE BOOGY
Marina “Nurse Boogy” Stankov-Hodge is the founder of Marina Astrological Consulting and Music LTD. She is an astrologer, musician, dancer, and registered nurse. In short she is a multi-media story teller who has to digest the difficulties of life through the arts. Her astrology practice is informed by both modern and traditional techniques and she draws off her counseling experience as a nurse as well. You can book a reading on her site www.marinaastrology.com . Subscribe to her free weekly horoscope at the bottom of her landing page and check out her blog for more astrological information!
She is also currently working on her first album. Her music has been described as “a warm hug”, “unconditional love”, and “a mantra”. She aspires to work more in the music industry curating music for film and editorial playlists. So be sure and let her know if you have a need for this or have any other resources to share towards this end. You can support her music by downloading it and following her at at www.nurseboogz.bandcamp.com
Also follow her on Spotify under her artist name “Nurse Boogz” and be on the lookout for more music from her soon on your favorite streaming platforms as “Nurse Boogz”. She is also contributing other writings on Medium. Her dancing is mostly popping and in another lifetime she worked and battled professionally in the US, Brazil, and Europe as a b-girl. She is a Fulbright Arts Alumni as well.
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LAURA KIRKABY
Laura joined Mixd Ingrdnts in 2013 and has been blessed to teach, perform, travel and be in sisterhood with her fellow members ever since.
She moved to San Francisco in 2011 from Minneapolis, where she received her BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota. She has studied a wide variety of dance forms including contemporary, popping, bgirling, waacking and tap.
Laura is now a proud mama of twins and is currently living in Minneapolis. Laura is a certified Balanced Body Pilates instructor, massage therapist and she specializes in foot and gait therapy.
She teaches online and her offerings can be found on her website www.InnerMostYou.com or her instagram.
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NIKKI RENOJO
Nikki is the penultimate student of street dance. She got her beginnings studying street dance in 2006 with Dr. Sergio Suarez at Ohlone College in Fremont then learned Locking from Ceech Hsu at Mission College in Santa Clara in 2009. From there she started a sweeping quest to learn from as many pioneers of the street styles as possible in order to preserve the styles and histories of the very popular street styles.
She attended Las Vegas Locking Camps where many Original Lockers taught, she reached out to Fluky Luke of the original Lockers to learn, whenever dancers came to the Bay Area she took their workshops: Ana Sanchez, Toni Basil, and more.
In 2015 she started organizing battles and workshops with friends and alongside Karla Flores in 2015 they invited Viktor Manoel to the Bay Area to teach and judge at the second waacking battle ever in the Bay Area Do It Disco. In 2020 she helped Leo Esclamado organize international Zoom classes for Chuck Powell and Kerney Mayers of East Oakland's pioneering Boogaloos the Black Messengers. Every summer she attends San Francisco legendary strutter Pop Tart's Strutters Room Master Camp held in San Francisco.
In 2022 she joined Mop Top Universal's first program to study with NYC's leading club dance legends and hiphop practitioners. She continues to seek out dance legends from the Soul Train era onwards to soak in histories and movement. Nikki joined Mix'd Ingrdnts in 2010 to expand her dance experience and performed in numerous amazing shows with the company over the years.
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MIKA LEMOINE
From Oakland, California (Ohlone land), mika lemoine has over a decade of experience as a facilitator and dancer, with a background in teaching artistry. She most recently held the title of Teaching Artist Mentor at Destiny Arts Center, holding space for young people to build community, leadership, and creativity through Hip-hop and Street Dance and their lineage and social context.
As a queer/white/femme artist, educator, and ever-learning accomplice, mika co-facilitates white and multiracial groups with her colleagues who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color to nurture conversations and creative approaches for looking at whiteness, working on anti-Blackness, and doing antiracism work.
She works with companies and organizations where she feels values aligned such as Resonant Source Consulting, Arts Education Alliance of the Bay Area, Embraced Body, and Rennie Harris University. mika is a principal dancer with Oakland based dance companies Mix’d Ingrdnts and dana e. fitchett’s movement4liberation and Be Movement Collective.
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In 2017, she co-founded See Through Soul, an Oakland-grown dance company that practices healing and storytelling through movement. mika holds a BA in Dance from UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures.
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AMBER JULIAN
Born and raised in the Bay, Amber Julian is a professional dancer of over 20 years whose style is often described as fierce and groovy. Her background and primary training is in Hip Hop and House, and she considers herself a freestyle dancer with an emphasis on somatic healing. She started dancing in Mix’d Ingrdnts Dance Company in 2013, and she was a primary multidisciplinary artist of over 7 years with Embodiment Project. She teaches classes regularly in Oakland and is currently a performing arts professor at USF. She believes that dance is medicine and a tool in moving and exchanging deep rooted energy in order to heal, make change and exude dynamic forms of visual expression.
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Upcoming Workshops:
"Move Thru" 2/13 & 2/15 at Dance Mission, SF
"MoveThru" is a space where all emotions and feelings are honored. It is a space where we can utilize the tool and magic of movement to move with and through all the feels. With an emphasis of afro-diasporic movement, elemental inspiration, breath, and stretching.
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Stay Connected with Amber
