Theresa Dickinson was first trained and performed as a ballet dancer studying in the 1950s with Leon Fokine and Olga Preobrajenskya. After earning a B.A. from Harvard, Ms. Dickinson began studying with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. Ms. Dickinson was a founding member of Twyla Tharp's earliest New York company, and later moved to San Francisco where she founded Tumbleweed Dance/Theatre/Music in the early 1970s. Her work has been among the earliest to include both aerial dance and contact improvisation. She has received numerous awards for choreography, to include an NEA & CAC award. In 2002 Ms. Dickinson established a dance retreat for eco-performance in the mountains of Lake County, California while teaching dance at the New College of California in San Francisco.

Theresa can be seen in the documentary Artists in Exile. An in-depth interview with Theresa and a section on the Tumbleweed group are included in this history of modern dance-making in San Francisco.

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EVENT:
Samir launches
The Art of Consulting


Samir Bitar is a choreographer, dance and arts management consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. A native of California, Samir began dance training at the San Francisco´s New College of California under the tutelage of Theresa Dickinson. In 1999 Samir co-founded and continues to dance with ZaZa Dance Theater. In 2003 Samir moved to New York to study at the Merce Cunningham Studio. While studying at the Cunningham Studio Samir earned a scholarship to the prestigious Royaumont Centre de Recherche et de Composition Chorégraphiques. To date Samir has created 21 original works, thirteen of which were collaborations. In 2006 Samir took a brief departure from dance to pursue graduate studies in arts management at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2007 Samir launched The Art of Consulting, a New York-based arts management consultancy. Samir contributes administratively to numerous arts and community nonprofits including: CPR- Center for Performance Research; New Dance Alliance; New York Dance Parade; Misnomer Dance Theater; The Marigold Project; and Americans for the Arts. Samir is 30 years old.

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