Instructors

Clàudia Fonte

Swing Dancer Clàudia Fonte explores and embraces all kinds of playful ways in her dancing. Her main source of inspiration is swing music itself. After taking the classic rhythms and moves as the foundation, she challenges herself to keep them alive through her own perspective and interpretation. While respecting and admiring the great historical tradition of swing dances, she believes in its evolution and expansion; respecting but also transforming the roots as she explores different ways of communication and expression both in vernacular jazz and in partner dance.
Authentic Jazz is where she feels most in her element. Solo jazz enables her to achieve a creative atmosphere of exploration and play where she takes on the challenges proposed by Swing music and finds her own voice and style.

Essential to her approach is promoting solo dancing in the context of social dancing. Sharing tools and techniques her objective is to help dancers to explore and develop a style the most authentic for them.

She believes that the dance floor is where everything starts, and the magic happens; where all dancers find their own way of dancing. @laclaudiafonte

Josette Wiggan

Josette Wiggan began her dance adventure with Paul and Arlene Kennedy in Los Angeles at the age of 12. A graduate of UCLA, Josette's career highlights include, the 2001 Spotlight Award winner in non- classical dance category, the 1st National Broadway Tour of 42nd Street, movies Idlewild and Princess and the Frog and studying with Germaine Acogny at L'ecole les Sables in Toubab Dialaw, Senegal. Alongside her brother, she was a part of two original casts of Cirque du Soleil's Banana Shpeel and Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour from 2009-2013. The duo also performed in Tireless, a curated show by Michelle Dorrance that had its debut at Jacob's Pillow in 2017. In 2020, Josette created and directed a work for film featuring vernacular jazz and tap dance entitled, Harlem Stomp. In collaboration with jazz trumpeter extraordinaire, Keyon Harrold, Josette created her latest work entitled Praise: The Inevitable Fruit of Gratitude. It had its debut at Jacob's Pillow and the Queens Theatre in the Park in 2021.

Currently Josette is on Faculty at USC's Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, teaching Vernacular Jazz and Tap Dance. Josette is a sought after educator/ choreographer/ performer and has dedicated her life to the perpetuation of African American Vernacular Jazz Dance. @josette_wiggan_taps

Laura Glaess

Laura started dancing in 2001 in San Antonio. It wasn’t a very large scene, and her teachers hadn’t been dancing very long, but she instantly fell in love with Lindy Hop, the music, the history and everything involved.

Currently, Laura is a dancer in the show Sw!ng Out, which premiered at the Joyce theater in 2021. She also travels the world teaching, competing, judging, performing and learning, and has won championship titles in partnered and solo vernacular dance. She feels that honoring the history of the dance and its inventors is a crucial part of practicing the dance. She is madly in love with jazz music and movement and strives to convey that love to her students. She is also a strong believer that the best way to get good at dancing is to DANCE. Classes are amazing and helpful, but they are a supplement to getting out there on the social dance floor and just doing it. Laura believes that the local scene is the backbone of the global community, so she is an active participant in her home music and dance communities.

Laura is also an artist, and works on blending her love of music and movement with a fine art medium. You can buy her prints at https://www.etsy.com/shop/lauraglaessart, and you can see her latest routines and dance tutorials at https://www.youtube.com/lauraglaess.

Chisomo Selemani

Chisomo Selemani is a speech-language pathologist, professor, and dance enthusiast. She is from Zambia, but has spent much of her life in the U.S. Even so, her very first dance lessons were from her mom and sisters. Chisomo became passionate about Afrobeats and dance fitness through dancing, performing and teaching with ZOCA dance Zambia. She has taught and performed across the U.S., mostly in conjunction with another dance passion, Swing. She loves to dance, perform, compete, and teach Lindy hop and Balboa. Part of her artistic journey has included an investigation of how these different Afrocentric dance styles collide. She and her teaching partners believe in collaborative and reflective teaching approaches, giving class participants the opportunity to explore, share, and grow. She is also the co-founder and co-host of the podcast Integrated Rhythm. She and her co-founder, co-host, editor, international swing dance instructor, bestie, and all round amazing guy about town, Bobby White seek to have meaningful conversations around hard topics with featured guests on the Integrated Rhythm podcast. Chisomo loves teaching, dancing, and sharing.

Denise Minns-Harris

Denise is a proud native New Yorker. Her father, Al Minns, a talented black man married her Jewish mother, Audrey Sands in 1949 when their marriage was illegal in most of the United States. Denise, is the third born of four. Denise’s father began teaching her to dance as soon as she could walk, and she has fond memories of performing with him at venues in NYC. Whenever he would return home from touring, he would hypnotize her with stories of the countries he’d performed in and how proudly people who look like her, in countries like Brazil and Nigeria, lived.

At 14, Denise became an active youth member of the Black Panther party, and at 16 years old – a 10th grade HS student - she talked her way into being accepted at the State University of New York - College at Old Westbury – where her revolutionary leanings became even more informed and polished. She majored in dance and education. Denise served as one of the head administrators of the Debbie Allen Dance Academy it’s first 15 years and with Debbie, raised it to be an internationally renowned Dance institution for young people.

Denise defines herself as a Lifelong Grassroots Activist, Arts Education Activist, Sister, Teacher, Wife, Mother, Grandmother, Dancer, Buddhist and professional Fundraiser for a wide variety of national and local political, educational, and progressive non-profit and advocacy organizations. Her parents’ example of courage taught her never to acquiesce to the status quo and to be willing to fight for what she believes in…especially dreams. Their example has been the touchstone of her life.