Staffs

Lauren Elson, MD is the Director of Dance Medicine at Spaulding Rehabilitation. Board certified in sports medicine and physical medicine and rehabilitation, she attended Tufts University School of Medicine, did her residency at New York Presbyterian Hospital Columbia/Cornell, and completed a fellowship in Sports Medicine at Stanford University.

Lauren deferred medical school to apprentice with a contemporary/tap company and has taught jazz, ballet, tap, hip-hop, African, swing, and salsa.  During college, she created her own major: Dance and Human Movement Studies, and received a fellowship to travel to the Gambia to investigate how African dance is used as a form of communication among different tribal groups/religions. She danced with Rainbow Tribe from 1999-2014 (when in Boston) and has been dancing with Cambridge Dance Company since its inception in 2012.

During her medical education, she had the opportunity to train with the physicians that care for ABT and NYCB and was a clinician at the Healthy Dancer Clinic in San Francisco.  She chairs the Freelance Dancer Committee on the Dance/USA Taskforce on Dance Health and is a member of the International Association of Dance Medicine and Science and the Performing Arts Medical Association.  She has given lectures, locally and internationally, on dance health and injury prevention to dancers and professional organizations.

Dr. Elson is interested in developing dance health and education programs in the Boston area as well uniting the dance medicine community to provide dancers with better access to specialized care.

In 2015, with both sons off to college, Murray returned to the performing arts after a 25 year “sabbatical.” He performs as an amateur Latin ballroom dancer and recently produced and co-directed a short film featuring contemporary and ballroom dancers, choreographers, and performance artists. He also runs a small financing consulting business.  Previously he was senior vice president of a radio station group and executive vice president, part owner and board member of a for-profit health care company. Murray has coached championship youth sports teams and served on many other nonprofit boards,including The Friends of Photography, Shearwater Association, Truro Bay Sanctuary, Children’s Ballet Theater, Boston Film/Video Foundation and Newton Central Little League.

Aysha Upchurch, the Dancing Diplomat, identifies as a seed planter, soil agitator, and curious and passionate artist.  Professionally, this translates to her working as a dancer, choreographer, educator and arts administrator who is committed to social inclusion, community engagement and artistry development.  Prior to relocating to Boston in 2014, she was based out of Washington, DC for over ten years, where she founded and directed the award-winning dance ensemble, Life, Rhythm, Move Project.  Blending her dance training and professional backgrounds in youth advocacy and conflict resolution, she uses Hip Hop dance to entertain and educate audiences while empowering youth.  Trained in Advancing Youth Development, she also facilitates movement and conflict resolution workshops for young people.  The thread of Hip Hop culture and arts runs throughout her work as an artist, and deeply informs how she positions herself as a facilitator and instructor with students of all ages.

Aysha has performed at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the White House and has been selected as a US State Department Cultural Envoy in Dance in Bolivia, Honduras and Guatemala. In 2007, she won the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage Local Dance Commissioning Project and created Am I On?, an award-winning evening-length Hip Hop work about the space between youth and adult voices. Aysha holds an M.A. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University and is currently on faculty at Salem State University.  She received her Ed.M., concentrating on Arts in Education, from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she has served as Teaching Fellow and Project Zero Classroom faculty member and is a current Visiting Practitioner in Education, documenting and creating works with students and across departments as an Artist-in-Residence seeking to raise the profile on dance education and Hip Hop pedagogy. Aysha is also the Associate Director of COOL Schools at VSA Massachusetts where she works at the intersection of arts integration, special education, and professional development, continuing to endeavor to position arts and teaching artists as central ingredients to progressive and inclusive education reform.

Karen Krolak is a Boston based choreographer, performer, teacher, presenter, writer, costume designer and knitter. Since 2000, she has been the Founder/Artistic Director of Monkeyhouse. Her choreography has been featured in dance concerts, site-specific works, plays, musicals, performance art pieces, films and gallery installations. Krolak’s ongoing project, the Dictionary of Negative Space holds space for unnamed ideas related to mourning and complex grief. A former BDA Board member returning to these responsibilities after a long hiatus, this term follows her crucial contributions to BDA’s 2020-2021 Dance and Disability Initiative. Karen is the first person to identify as a dancer with disabilities to serve in this capacity.

José is a former professional dancer with Zenon Dance and Black Label Movement who is working on his Master’s in Art and Cultural Leadership at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. A former swim champion and coach, he has also worked for the Minnesota Orchestra and with cosmetics companies L’Occitane En Provence and Estée Lauder. His past volunteer service has spanned organizations ranging from the City of Boston Veterans Services to American Cancer Society. José works as a mortgage loan originator for Fairway Independent in Back Bay.

Portia Abernathy Brown is Director of Operations at VSA Massachusetts, an affiliate of Seven Hills Foundation, which promotes the involvement of people of all abilities in the cultural life of our communities. She was Assistant Director for Education and Community Initiatives at Boston Ballet where she directed programming that provided accessible and inclusive dance education to 3,000 students in the Boston area each year and offered trainings and professional development opportunities to educators and service providers.  Portia earned her Master of Education in Prevention Science and Practice from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, her Master of Arts in Curriculum and Instruction from The University of Colorado and graduated cum laude from Colorado College.  She is a member of the Berkley Institute for Arts Education and Special Needs advisory board, is the Primary Consultant for United Dance, and was a finalist for the 2017 Massachusetts Non-Profit Network Young Professional Excellence Award.

Andrea Blesso has danced with each of the elements – underwater, 18ft in the air, spinning fire fans, and in the mountains of Portugal. She has many careers – as a Director of Dance at the Boston Center for the Arts, as a performer & Board member for EgoArt, Inc., as a model for artist Judith Larsen, as a Board member for ANIKAYA Dance Theater and Boston Dance Alliance. Throughout her dance life, Andrea has performed with Snappy Dance Theater, Bennett Dance Company, Falling Flight Project, Partners for Youth with Disabilities, and Annie Kloppenberg & Dancers, among others.

Andrea founded the current layers of dance programs at the Boston Center for the Arts in 2009 and has been refining and creating opportunities for the dancers of New England ever since. With over a decade of experience creating and managing dance programs in direct response to community need, Andrea has produced and partnered with over 90 dance companies in a program leadership role.

Smitha Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology and LuElla LaMer Slaner Professor of Women’s Studies at Wellesley College. She is a feminist ethnographer of gender and globalization currently researching India’s microfinance industry.  When she is not teaching or writing, she performs and teaches classical and contemporary Indian dance forms, especially Bharatanatyam. She is a longtime dancer with Aparna Sindhoor’s Navarasa Dance Theater, now based in Los Angeles, and serves on its board. In 2015, she established NATyA Dance Studio in Natick. Smitha earned her academic degrees — A.B., M.A., Ph.D – from the University of California at Berkeley.

Laura Levitan is Business Development Manager at Mintz who recently relocated to the Boston area from Chicago. With 15 years of experience in legal marketing and business development, Laura leads client acquisition, engagement and retention initiatives and develops brand awareness and market penetration strategies. Laura received her degree in political science from The George Washington University.  As a childhood dancer Laura wrote a letter to President Bill Clinton lobbying for increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Her passion continues to this day and she thrilled to support dancers across the Boston metropolitan area.

David Parker spent his childhood in Lynnfield, Massachusetts and started his career studying tap and ballet in Boston.  He moved to New York City in 1979 and performed tap, modern, post-modern, folk, ballet and experimental tap before forming his own company, The Bang Group in 1995,which tours widely throughout the United States and Europe. TBG has enjoyed a second home in Boston since being resident company at Summer Stages Dance for 13 seasons, in addition to appearing at the ICA, Out on the Edge Festival (Theater Offensive,) First Night Boston, and elsewhere.  TBG Group is currently company-in-residence at The Yard on Martha’s Vineyard where Parker serves as co-curator for the percussive dance festival Tap the Yard.

Recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, Parker has created over 40 commissioned works for ballet and modern companies, universities, soloists and theater artists.  He launched Dance Now Boston, a branch of Dance Now NYC, which commissions innovative dance for cabaret spaces such as Oberon at the American Repertory Theater.  David has taught at Princeton, SUNY Purchase and Hunter College and at the Ailey School, Juilliard and Barnard College. He writes regularly for Dance Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and several blogs, serves in the board of Danspace Project, has been a member of The New York Dance and Performance (“Bessie”) Awards committee as well as several community and granting panels.