Carla Escoda trained as a ballet and modern dancer at Ballet Philippines in Manila, Connecticut Ballet, and Yale University, where she performed with the Yaledancers and received her B.S. and M.S. in Engineering & Applied Science with a double major in French Literature.
She resumed the practice of ballet after a hiatus of 20 years, as a form of physical therapy following the onset of a severe case of arthritis.
She has lived in Asia for much of her life, but she has also called San Francisco home, where she taught ballet for several years and started writing about the arts. She has worked with artists on grant writing and has reviewed dance, theatre and art in New York, the Bay Area, Hong Kong and points in between. Her writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, Bachtrack, KQED Arts, dance journal/hk, Dance International, Playbill and Dance Europe. She became a Google Glass Explorer when that controversial short-lived technology was introduced in 2013 and produced an experimental dance film with Glass before it gave way to bulkier and uglier headsets. Go figure.
Carla is an American Ballet Theatre ABT® Certified Teacher, who has successfully completed the ABT® Teacher Training Intensive in Primary through Level 7 and Partnering of the ABT® National Training Curriculum, a breakthrough eight-level program that combines high quality artistic training with the basics of dancer health and child development.
In a prior incarnation, Carla worked in banking and project finance in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore. And in the heyday of ‘Star Wars’ (no, not the film, the Reagan-era Cold War period, when defense-based research was all the rage) she flirted with science, knocking about in darkened labs, wielding enormous lasers, and computing on gigantic mainframes. Those were the glamour days.
Former ballerina Leigh Donlan trained in Russian technique and a variety of folk and modern dance techniques, was Children’s Ballet Mistress at the Washington School of Ballet, Director of the Athenaeum School of Ballet, and studied English at the University of Oregon and Public Relations at Georgetown University. She is a devout arts advocate who likes to focus on women artists. She has been writing for Ballet to the People since 2014.
Andrew Blackmore-Dobbyn lives in Brooklyn where he is a husband, a father to a teenager, a chef and an avid dance writer. Fatherhood is by far the hardest of his jobs. In his first career, he was a ballet dancer with the Hartford Ballet and the Ohio Ballet and never lost his love for the art. He just wishes he had more time to see more shows.
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