About Founder of the Collective
Derrick L. Washington has had a dance, choreography, and research career that spans over 13 years. Starting his pre-professional training in culture and dance with American street dance, he was taught rare, animated, illusionary, and soulful forms from pioneering dance artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. He continues the Bay Area street dance tradition of promoting community while pushing the limits of the art form.
Moving to Los Angeles to study cultural anthropology at UCLA, Derrick learned the different techniques incorporated in Southern California styles of street dance. During this time of artistic expansion, he began training with West African, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, and Cuban dance masters at the Lula Washington Dance School. He concentrated on learning the rich repertoire of movements contained in Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban dances. Through expert guidance, Derrick learned about the get-down,an important element that links different African Diasporic dances. This helped him create inventive dance performances that touched dance students and audiences alike.
During the summer of 2005, Derrick received a scholarship to travel to Brazil with the directors of Vivir Brazil and study with Brazilian dance masters in Salvador da Bahia,Sao Paulo, and Belo Horizonte. After numerous performances and creating the L.A. Street Dance Collective in Southern California, Derrick devoted time to learning dance movements related to identity, equality, and community solidarity.
In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Derrick received fellowships to travel to Cuba to teach dance, research community education organizations, and train in Afro-Cuban folkloric dance. He has his master's degree and is currently completing his PhD dissertation through the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to his work in Cuba, he is documenting his family's history in Mississippi, Louisiana, and the Caribbean. He uses knowledge gained from school to not only teach history, cultural anthropology, and dance, but also help create national policy that makes movement an essential academic subject in public schooling.
Moving to New York City to work on his doctoral dissertation in 2011, Derrick accepted the position as executive director of El Fogon Center for the Arts. In addition to community outreach projects, he manages educational, cultural, and artistic content. El Fogon has been recognized by the Mott Haven Herald, Channel 12 News the Bronx, Bronx 360, and has hosted Los Muñiquitos de Matanzas, Urban Voices Heard, the late Felix "Pupy" Insua, Gaita Folklorica Colombiana, The Peace Poets, and the official Sí Cuba / Bronx Museum After-Party Rumba. Derrick actively reveals that dance and the arts are more than a pastime: they have the ability to produce individuality and collectivity, demonstrate love yet strike injustice, entertain while being more complex than rocket science.
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