Music | Movement | Culture | Joy
Monica Berini is a dancer, percussionist, independent researcher, teacher, and writer dedicated to movement arts that are of, by, and for the people.
Her areas of interest include Mediterranean dances and musical traditions, with a primary focus on Egyptian raqs baladi (رقص بلدي) and Southern Italian tarantelle and other danze popolari. These are imperfectly-named, highly localized, and vernacular-driven art forms, rooted in both popular entertainment and personal expression. Each emerged within an often marginalized cultural context, and remain steadfastly local even as wider popularity threatens to essentialize and flatten them. They have moved from source through diaspora and back again, and remain in a sometimes tense globalized and multi-geographic conversation.
Monica's dance work is ancestral, community-oriented, and joyfully liberatory. As a guest in the cultures she moves within (even as a distant but decidedly diasporic member of each), she remains a lifelong learner.
Raised bicoastally between New York and California, Monica has been living and working in Oakland and San Francisco, traditional lands of the Ohlone people, since her teens. She holds a BA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in TESOL with a focus on Applied Linguistics and Adult Education Theory from San Francisco State University.
Monica draws inspiration from her own diverse roots, including her Abruzzese, Sicilian, Ticinese, Tunisian, Polish, and Ukrainian (Hutsul/Galician) ancestry—echoes of mid-20th century mass immigration shaped by punk rock, art, and activism are woven through her work.
My artist statement and teaching philosophy
Pay your land tax
