DanceVersity Founder - Hannah Romanowsky
Hannah Romanowsky is a professional performing artist, dance educator, and the founding director of the DanceVersity multicultural youth arts education program. Ms. Romanowsky holds a B.A. in Dance Ethnology with a Minor in World Music, an M.A. in East-West Psychology, and has a remarkably diverse background in both Eastern and Western dance traditions.
Hannah began her training at age 6 at the Kreuzer Academy of the Performing Arts, grew up on the stage immersed in theater and dance, and by her teens was teaching and choreographing for community musical theater and dance productions. She began studying dance, music, and costuming from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkan Roma with folklorist Katarina Burda, performing with Aywah! Ethnic Dance Company, studied Persian and Central Asian dance with Sharlyn Sawyer, and has performed with the esteemed Ballet Afsaneh at some of the most prestigious venues in the San Francisco bay area, including multiple appearances in the Ethnic Dance Festival at the Palace of Fine Arts, as well as the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the British Museum in London, and for the Roof of the World Festival in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan.
While in Tajikistan in 2011 she was an artist in residence
at the Padida Dance Theater of Dushanbe and trained with
some of the most highly regarded masters of Tajik
dance. Ms. Romanowsky has also toured China, studied
with the Roma of Turkey, and participated in the Desert
Dance Festival in Rajasthan, India. Hannah’s career emphasis
has been on the traditional repertoire of Central Asia and
the Middle East, she has also trained in flamenco, North
Indian Kathak, and dances of the African Diaspora and Latin
America.
A first-generation American on her father’s side, the granddaughter of performing artists from Belarus and Finland, early memories of dancing with her grandfather to music from her ancestral homeland were fondly engraved in Hannah’s mind providing a foundation for her life-long devotion to culturally specific dance and her passion for sharing it with young people.
Hannah founded DanceVersity in 2005 where she continues to mentor beginning through pre-professional dancers, encouraging them to adopt a more expansive, global perspective of dance as an invaluable conveyor of cultural values and a rich source of artistic and creative inspiration. Her grassroots organization is a project of Afsaneh Art & Culture Society and offers an innovative, integrated curriculum of dance, music, folk arts, costuming, and cultural studies with the aim of providing American youth with a positive experience of world cultures at a formative age.
Hannah and
DanceVersity Senior Ensemble at the Berkeley Tibitan
Festival, 2011
Romanowsky is pronounce "Roman-ov-ski" and may also be spelled Romonovski, Romanovski, or Romonowski.
