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Monica brings over three decades of movement, music, percussion, and language experience to her raqs sharqi and raqs baladi performance and education offerings. She is a  recognized and respected member of the cultural, dance, music, and art communities she comes from. 

Her performances are audience-focused and joy-bringing experiences, always tailored to the event, and can include live or recorded music. 

Her instruction is rooted in respect for the dancers and respect for  the forms, and her classes are musically driven, with an additional focus on cultural, political, and  artistic context, going beyond globalized "belly dance".

Monica is a social practitioner of pizzica and other regional tarantelle from of Southern Italy. Piecing together childhood memories with lots of new learning and re-learning over the last ten years, her focus plays with defossilizing diasporic dance and music expressions while exploring and respecting how they got that way. 

Monica offers weekly online pizzica and regional tarantelle skill shares (currently on hiatus) and in-person study and skillshare groups in San Francisco, where she is slowly but surely putting together un collettivo di danza - a movement, percussion, and cultural context skill share and collective. 

Reach out if you are interested in participating. 

Monica plays tambourines and frame drums, specifically the duf, rand tamburello as well as sagat (finger cymbals) and castagnette (castanets). 

Monica is a core percussionist with the Bay Area Arab Orchestra Aswat Ensemble and occasionally plays with several other project-oriented Arabic music groups. 

She  recently been sitting in with Duo Pizzicato, playing a wide variety of Italian music.

She is always interested in working with fellow musicians. Reach out!

Monica 's weekly Egyptian dance classes are on hiatus during her 2025 sabbatical. 

Past long term instructor positions include Alonzo King Lines  Dance Center, where she was teaching faculty from 2003- 2025, Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (as a teaching artist-in-residence for San Francisco public schools), Marin School of the Arts (teaching  artist-in-residence), Belly Dance! studio (teaching faculty and  curriculum development), and the Women's Cancer Resource Center (teaching faculty).  

Upcoming workshops can be found on the calendar.

Interested in hiring me for a workshop? My current topics and offerings can be found here.

Please reach out if you are interested in dance or music bookings, classes, lectures, or collaborations.

Take  a dancer trained in two specific and deeply rooted cultural styles, who holds deep reverence and respect for them both. She loves the land, people, and traditions that develop(ed) and foster(ed) them. She is recognized as maybe knowing something by community keepers and elders. She has committed decades of her life to them. 

What  is that dancer to do to scratch an artistic itch, to use  her lifetime of dancing to try new things while not pretending it is  anything but authentic to her own experiences, loves, losses, joys,  laughs, tears, friendships, body, and interests? When she has to dance  it to find out what it means? When cultural integrity is a standard she  uses for her dance work? When her own mixed and not-so-distant roots are tangled and alive and loudly beckoning?  When she isn't doing it for fame or fortune? When she knows there are connections and paths and doors and bliss and change to be made with  this expression? When she wants to work with others in her communities  who are also figuring it out as they go?

Spoiler  alert / switch to first person: It me. I'm figuring it out. Like all things worth doing, it is  sometimes awesome and sometimes embarrassing, it's all about  collaborating with fellow weirdos, and it's probably about the process  more than any particular destination.

So  far in 2025 this looks like finding experimental musical artists from beloved source cultures and interpreting and working with them to see  what happens.  Please never let me be a context-free artist. None of this happens in a vacuum or a tower or alone. It  looks like doing and performing the rooted work I've been trained and  raised in, and then also adding a piece in that pushes me a little, and  maybe the form, and maybe the audience, and maybe the work, while  keeping it connected and growing in a way that is also rooted. 

We shall see. Here for the conversations and the here for the lavoro. 

Monica offers private classes and coaching in person in San Francisco or online anywhere in the world. She has worked one on one with dancers, duets, troupes, and small groups of collaborators who are creating or polishing a piece, looking for inspiration, or need a  critical but supportive eye on their work, progression, or style.   

Rates start at $90 per hour, plus studio rent, if any. Private lessons can also take place on Zoom.  

Please contact Monica for a questionnaire and initial email consultation so we can make sure that lessons are focused and on point for your  needs.   

Need choreography? Reach out to Monica  for current rates, references, and details of how it all works. 

Sometimes 1:1 work leads to more of a mentorship. That is a conversation best had in person.