About Founder
Derrick L. Washington has had a dance career that spans over 13 years. Starting with American street dance and Funk Styles, 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, African, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, and Cuban dance masters received him as their own. He concentrated on learning the rich repertoire of movements contained in Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban dances. Through intense training, 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, he traveled to Brazil with the director and co-director of Vivir Brazil to 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, resistance, and community solidarity.
In the summers of 2007 and 2008, Derrick traveled to Cuba to teach popping as well as receive training and research religion, Afro-Cuban folkloric dance, rumba, and Caribbean popular dances. Derrick has his master’s and is working on his PhD dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin. He uses knowledge gained from school to not only teach history, cultural anthropology, and dance, but also create national policy that makes movement an essential academic subject in public schooling.
In the summer of 2010, Derrick will travel to the Mississippi Delta region to research and learn different styles of blues dance. He’s will also document southern styles of swing dance by connecting with veteran dancers and visiting jazz hot spots in New Orleans, Alabama, and Mississippi.
With his performances, dance courses, continued training, academic research, community engagement, and Diasporic School of the Arts & Culture, Derrick actively reveals that dance is more than a pastime: it has the ability to produce individuality and collectivity, demonstrate love yet strike injustice, entertain while being more complex than rocket science.