Dr Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho is Lecturer in Brazilian Studies at Brazil Institute, King’s College London. He is  also Honorary Associate Professor for Brazilian Studies at Aarhuns Unviersity, Denmark, where he worked preivously to his current position. His research is focused on Brazilian Literature, Music and Culture. He has severeal article on Brazilian music. Besides his academic carreer, he is also a conductor and lute player. He had conducted choirs and orchestras in Brazil, Germany, Denmark, France, Russia, Slovakia and UK. Since 2015 he directs the King’s Brazil Ensemble, at KCL.

Dr Zoe Norridge joined the Department of English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London in September 2012. Prior to King’s she was a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and Director of the Aftermaths Research Strand at the University of York, Department of English and Related Literature. She has a BA and MPhil in Modern Languages (Cambridge), a PhD in African Literature (SOAS) and spent two years as the Salvesen Fellow at New College Oxford, affiliated with the Department of English and Centre for African Studies. Before becoming an academic, Dr Norridge worked in health promotion for NGOs in the UK (Cancer Research UK, Terrence Higgins Trust) and Papua New Guinea (VSO). Since being selected as one of ten inaugural “New Generation Thinkers” by the BBC and AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK) in 2011, Zoe has made several short pieces for Radio 3. Her most recent book is Perceiving Pain in African Literature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Zoe is an accomplished salsa dancer, dancing with London’s Pexava Dance with her husband and dance partner, Dr Keon West. Recently, she has curated a paradigm-shifting exhibition on contemporary photography from Rwanda, Rwanda in Photographs, which has been received extremely well by the press and public.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/people/academic/norridge/index.aspx
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/cultural/culturalinstitute/showcase/current/kei/artsandglobal/rwanda.aspx

Born in 1966 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, and brought up in metropolitan France, Wilfrid (Willy) Vertueux received an education from his parents that kept alive his connection to Caribbean roots. It is thus with a knowing smile that he readily endorses that term all too often used pejoratively- ‘négropolitain’. Trained as a visual designer at Paris’s Arts Appliqués de la Rue Olivier de Serres (ENSAAMA) and at Arts Décoratifs de Paris (ENSAD), Wilfrid has, since 1994, been a freelance graphic designer and illustrator in the fields of publishing, media, visual identity and advertising. Informed by his passion for the image in the broadest sense of the term, his mastery of typography, intuitive understanding of iconographic relationships in modern visual culture, and creative photographic work, he declares himself a ‘multitasking visual designer’. Immersed in music from a young age due to his Caribbean upbringing, Willy also adroitly manages a double life as an internationally leading Latin music DJ. Ever since first acing the turntables in 1987 at the Montecristo Café in the City of Light, and later, as founding member of the Paris DJ Collective Papas DJs and as the second half of the Duo, ‘Devils and Angels’, he has been resident DJ at Paris’s most fabled clubs; he also travels every weekend to play at salsa festivals in Europe and beyond. Despite his constant demand at cross-body salsa events, he can play all types of Latin music, Antillean genres (zouk and kompa) and the Angolan kizomba and semba, depending on the crowd and its taste. ‘There are more bad DJs making wrong choices than bad music’, is his belief. Luckily, life sometimes brings him the opportunity to reconcile his two domains of expertise and passion. His work with Modern Moves as our resident DJ and design consultant is a perfect illustration.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGnCBn0IZ8&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D6eGnCBn0IZ8

Choreographer, dancer, and scholar Thomas F. DeFrantz has a joint appointment as Professor in the dance program and African and African American Studies department at Duke University. His first book, entitled Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance for the SDHS series Studies in Dance History, won the Erroll Hill Award for Research in Black Theater. His second book was the riveting Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture, and his widely cited articles and essays on the black body in dance constitute some of the most exciting work in the area today. He served as archivist for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and organized the dance history program at the Ailey school for many years. Creatively, he has created music for the Dance Theatre of Harlem, choreographed the play for young people Paul Robeson, All-American, written by Ossie Davis, and collaborated with Ballet Hispanico on Border Crossings. For years he was also active with the Theater Offensive of Boston, who produced his original musical play, Queer Theory: An Academic Travesty. The intersection of academic work and dance practice also manifests itself in his role as founder and artistic director of artistic director of SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology. He is currently President of the international scholarly body, the Society of Dance History Scholars. http://www.slippage.org

http://aaas.duke.edu/people?Gurl=&Uil=14939&subpage=profile
http://arts.duke.edu/category/arts-journal-tags/faculty

Professor Paul Gilroy is a scholar of Cultural Studies and Black Atlantic diasporic culture. It is not over-exaggeration to say that all current work on the concept of the Black Atlantic owes an immense debt to his formulation and development of the concept in his seminal book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). His other works include There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (1987) and After Empire (2004) (published as Postcolonial Melancholia in the United States). Paul taught at South Bank University, Essex University, and then Goldsmiths College for many years before leaving London to take up a tenured post at Yale University, where he was the chair of the Department of African American Studies and Charlotte Marian Saden Professor of Sociology and African American Studies. He returned to London to become the first holder of the Anthony Giddens Professorship in Social Theory at the London School of Economics before he joined King’s College London in September 2012. Paul’s areas of scholarly interest encompass postcolonial studies, particularly with regard to London, postimperial melancholia and the emplotment of English victimage; the literature and cultural politics of European decolonisation; African American intellectual and cultural history, literature and philosophy; the formation and reproduction of national identity especially with regard to race and ‘identity’; and the literary and theoretical significance of port cities and pelagics. Paul has also published on art, music and social theory.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/people/academic/gilroy/index.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gilroy

Naresh Fernandes is a journalist who lives in Bombay. He is the editor of Scroll.in, a digital daily, and a consulting editor at National Geographic Traveller India. Naresh was previously editor-in-chief of Time Out India, which has editions in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore. He has also worked at The Times of India and the Associated Press in Mumbai, and The Wall Street Journal in New York. He is the author of the widely acclaimed and prize-winning book, Taj Mahal Foxtrot: the definitive history of Bombay’s jazz age from the 1930s-1960s (Roli Books?, 2012); the product of many years of research, it was written up during his tenure as a Poeisis Fellow at the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University. In his words, the book is about ‘listening to the city through the ears of its jazz fans and its jazz musicians.’ Naresh maintains an active blog on the archival material excavating through the work on Taj Mahal Foxtrot and has most recently authored a new book, City Adrift: A Short Biography of Bombay (Aleph books, 2013). His expertise on the transnational musical histories of the Goan and Anglo-Indian communities in India make him an invaluable addition to Modern Moves.

http://www.tajmahalfoxtrot.com/
http://www.tajmahalfoxtrot.com/?page_id=7
http://www.thehindu.com/books/naresh-fernandes/article5533891.ece
http://www.afropop.org/wp/8489/hip-deep-interview-naresh-fernandes-on-bombays-jazz-age/

Marissa is a historian of southern Africa. Her research focuses on the intersection between politics and culture in colonial and independent Angola, and her path-breaking book Intonations: a Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, 1945- Recent Times (Ohio University Press, 2008) explores how music was a practice in and through which Angolans living under extreme political repression imagined the nation, and how the particularities of music and historical moment cast this process of imagining in gendered terms. In other words, she is interested in the ways that cultural practice is productive of politics and not just derivative of it. Much of her evidence comes from interviews with musicians and consumers of music and she explores how memory, experience and pleasure shape politics and history. She is currently working on a book entitled Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1933-2002 (forthcoming from with Ohio University Press), which looks at the relationship between the technology of radio and the shifting politics of southern Africa as anti-colonial movements established independent states in the context of a region newly charged by Cold War politics. Another project, tentatively called Kuduro in Transatlantic Translation, studies the contemporary Angolan music and dance genre, kuduro, both in Angola and as it has been adapted in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), Lisbon, Paris, Amsterdam and New York. Marissa is also an accomplished yoga practitioner and instructor.

Professor of Latin American History at the University of Leeds and closely involved in the life of the Leeds Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies from its inception, Manuel studied History at undergraduate level at the University of Havana. He then took a MA in Comparative History and a PhD in History at the University of Essex. After concluding his PhD he went on to teach at the universities of Essex and Nottingham before coming to Leeds in 2006. Manuel’s research focuses on the history of slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, including comparisons between Afro-Cuban and Afro-Brazilian cultures. His most recent books are The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas (Louisiana State University Press, 2012) and West African Warfare in Bahia and Cuba: Soldier Slaves in the Atlantic World, 1807-1844 (Oxford University Press, 2014; sponsored by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship). His Cuban heritage makes Manuel a natural on the salsa dance floor, and his travels in Luanda have exposed him to the world of Angolan social dance. Most recently he has started research for a new book on the Cuban Sugar Kings, a Havana-based baseball team from the 1950s and 1960s, through whose story he will explore the intersection of politics and baseball in the early days of the Cuban Revolution.

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/people/125056/history_research_group/person/1001/manuel_barcia_paz

Photo by Steve Martin Photography

Magna Gopal is one of the leading instructors and performers in the global salsa industry with over 15,000 followers across her social networks. She is world-renowned for her teaching methods, her creative musicality, and her ability effortlessly to connect, related and transfer knowledge to almost any demographic. A role model for dancers and women in general, she started from no background in dance to become one of the top solo female artists and instructors in a predominantly male-dominated industry.

Originally from India, she moved to Canada with her family, where she obtained her BA in Economics and International Relations at the University of Toronto while being simultaneously exposed to Latin dance culture. After completing her degree she decided to pursue her passion in dance relentlessly. Starting out with performing and choreographing for Toronto-based student and professional teams, she later branched out on her own, moving to the New York/ New Jersey area, where is is based. As one of the self-taught wonders of the salsa world, she accredits her pedagogy to the fact that she had to discover and analyse body movement by herself. Her methodology, affable nature, and genuine desire to see individuals grow have made her one of the most respected and sought-after instructors and dancers. She has taught and performed in over 5 countries and has shared the stage with the best-known dancers and top Latin bands, including Jimmy Bosch, El Gran Combo, New Swing Sextet, Mambo Legends and Bronx Horns.

Magna was a Featured Dances and Assistant Choreographer for the short film ‘Mano’, which won Best Cinematography at the Sol Dance Film Festival, and has choreographed for many teams and couples since. She has released two instructional DVDs and is working on new releases. Though salsa is her forte, she also dances West Coast Swing, Bachata, Kizomba, Semba, Tango, Forrò, and Samba de Gafieira. Her desire is to teach and motivate people to be better dancers while inspiring them to grow as individuals and challenge cultural norms through an increased awareness of, and respect for, the human connection within dance. One of her mottos is ‘learn the rules, master the rules, break the rules’, and she encourages others to explore this philosophy as well.

www.MagnaGopal.com
www.Facebook.com/MagnaGopalPublic
www.YouTube.com/MagnaGopal

Kwenda Lima was born in Cape Verde in 1977. He is an accomplished dancer and choreographer. He has worked on various projects and has more than ten years of experience in teaching traditional and modern couple dances from Angola and Cape Verde. His unique command of style and musicality has made him one of the world’s most sought after teachers of the Angolan dance form kizomba. Additionally, he has been developing a very personalized project, Kaizen Dance, which touches people’s hearts and souls through the unification of West African kinetic principles with philosophical approaches drawn from Indic and Buddhist thought. With his dance company, he is also building up a repertoire of contemporary African dance, including, most recently, the thought-provoking work Muloma (Let Us Be United). Kwenda is currently living in Lisbon, and teaching at kizomba festivals and salsa weekends all over the world, at which he regularly conducts kaizen workshops as well. In another life, Kwenda also obtained a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Kingston University in London; he believes in having carried over (and transformed) engineering’s basic principle of creating comfortable conditions for human existence, into his current work with kaizen dance. His charisma and generosity in teaching is an inspiration for all those who are touched by his practice.

http://kwendalima.com/
http://dancemefree.com/tag/kwenda-lima/
https://www.facebook.com/KwendaLima.KaizenDance