Narluga Arts is a grants management and consulting firm working with socially-engaged artists and organizations. We specialize in hybridized, collaborative projects, supporting an extraordinary cohort of multidisciplinary artists who believe art has the power to change the world.
Parangal Dance Company
Services
Narluga Arts is a creative consulting and grants management firm dedicated to socially-engaged artists and organizations. We champion a human-centered approach to the arts, fostering hybridized and collaborative projects that merge disciplines and perspectives. By empowering a diverse cohort of multidisciplinary artists, Narluga Arts drives impactful, transformative initiatives that harness the power of art to create positive social change.
Grant Writing
Our grant writing services help socially-engaged artists and organizations secure reliable funding by crafting clear and compelling proposals, backed by over 20 years of experience.
Grants Management
From budgeting to reporting, we organize grant materials to streamline and enhance the efficiency of the application process.
Project Design
We develop competitive, collaborative project designs that blend artistic disciplines to address social issues and create meaningful art initiatives, ensuring each project aligns with the artists' vision and community goals.
Creative Consultation
Personalized guidance to help artists and organizations develop strategic plans and innovative solutions, supporting and enhancing artistic visions through a collaborative, proven approach.
Artistic Career Development
Personalized career development and consulting for artists — guidance on portfolio building, networking, and strategic planning toward professional and social-impact goals.
Creative Design
Web design with a focus on UX/UI, plus print and web design materials produced in-house to support artistic projects as needed.
Clients & Projects
Programs
A Pilot in Community-Led Arts Evaluation · 2026–2027
Common Evaluation
A pilot in community-led arts evaluation, building the data infrastructure small arts organizations have never had.
Art lovers rejoice: A new study suggests that engaging with art and culture may help slow biological aging.Innovation in Aging — May 11, 2026
A societal shift is underway: the fields of arts, public health, and economic development are converging. Studies and books like Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives are going mainstream. The social prescribing revolution is rapidly expanding, and new frontiers in arts funding are opening up.
But the wider field is still missing what's happening down in the grassroots, where cultural arts practitioners are doing what they've done for generations with little-to-no funding or institutional support: healing, organizing, and sustaining communities. For small arts organizations, we don't have the data to tell our stories — administrators and artists are overworked and burnt out, with little capacity for meaningful evaluation.
The vision for Common Evaluation is to implement a standard evaluation framework for small arts organizations, using Results Based Accountability (RBA), a community-led framework developed by Harlem Children's Zone and widely used in the social service sector. With RBA, the community itself leads the evaluation, deciding collectively what data matters most and how to gather it — rigorous, owned, and useful to both the people doing the work and the funders supporting it.
Over the last three years, Narluga Arts has worked with World Arts West and Vital Arts, in collaboration with arts equity researcher Anh Thang Dao Shah, to develop ambitious Bay Area arts community research projects. In 2025–2026, Dance Mission Theater staff trained in and ran its first evaluation pilot utilizing the RBA framework, led by Artistic Director Sarah Crowell, with Narluga Arts co-designing and helping implement the program. Building on that success, this fall Narluga is leading a training of eight Bay Area cultural arts organizations to begin scaling the work across the Narluga Arts network.
Support small orgs in training and administering this no-cost, trust-based, community-led evaluation framework — ingraining it into the fabric of their organizational culture.
Support data communication by producing final impact reports that are currently only in the domain of larger, more resourced orgs.
Share collective impact in numbers funders, policymakers, and the press can use — public health, economic, and beyond.
Expand the funding pool beyond arts funding into public health and economic development funding.
Connect to the national SocialRx movement.
Piloted withWorld Arts WestVital ArtsDance Mission Theater
Staff
Jason Ditzian (he/him)
Executive Director
Jason studied Biology, Creative Writing and Music at George Washington University. During his senior year he interned at the Washington Performing Arts Society, working with Alvin Ailey, Kronos Quartet, Steve Reich and other luminaries, sparking a lifelong love of working in the arts presenting field. After graduation, Jason moved to San Francisco and immersed himself in the eclectic arts scene. As a multi-wind instrumentalist and composer, he has performed, recorded and toured internationally with artists such as Charming Hostess, Oakland Symphony, SF Symphony, Dohee Lee, Joan Baez, Frank London, inkBoat and SF Mime Troupe. He is clarinetist and leader of klezmer ensemble Kugelplex and publisher of the online community Klezmer.com. On the presenting side, Jason began working with organizations in 2003, producing shows and festivals and creating development strategies, helping raise millions of dollars for nonprofit arts organizations. Career highlights include co-founding and co-producing the International Body Music Festival with Guggenheim Fellow Keith Terry; winning a 2011 American Council of Engineering Companies Engineering Excellence Award for the Bowls Project with Charming Hostess; winning an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for his work with Butoh legends Koichi and Hiroko Tamano; and co-founding and directing Dohee Lee Puri Arts with Guggenheim Fellow Dohee Lee. Jason founded Narluga Arts in 2019 to support artists and organizations in increasing their capacity and realizing their visions, and to help further the field of socially-engaged arts.
Eva Lin Fahey (she/her)
Artistic Director
Eva is a painter, designer, and writer based in Western Massachusetts. Since joining Narluga Arts in 2019, Eva has worked to support socially-engaged artists and organizations. After completing her BFA in painting with a minor in art history at UMass Amherst, she continues to create and exhibit work while combining her visual work with poetry and writing; her paintings and writing were recently published in Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. As one of over a quarter of a million children adopted internationally from China, her work exists within the context of this shared experience of cultural loss, personal migration, and separation, centered on themes of motherhood, intergenerational ties, and the East Asian diaspora. A 2023 ValleyCreates Grantee through MASS MoCA's Assets for Artists program, she has exhibited across Massachusetts and in El Dorado, Arkansas. As a designer, Eva specializes in user-centered designs that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional, blending her fine arts background with contemporary design principles.
Jesse Olsen Bay is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Western Massachusetts. His work centers on facilitating community musical groups, including community marching bands and singing circles. As a composer, he collaborates frequently with choreographers and dance companies, for which he has received two Isadora Duncan Awards. His work has been supported by New Music USA, American Composers Forum, Ucross Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Bay is the founding director of Weathervane Community Arts, an organization that builds community through music in Western Massachusetts and beyond, and is currently on faculty at UMass Amherst.
Twelve Gates Arts is a Philadelphia nonprofit and the longest-running contemporary art space dedicated to South Asian, SWANA and diasporic artists. Founded in 2009, it presents contemporary art that refuses to be exoticized, exploring migration, identity, queerness and cultural resilience.
An annual festival of moving-image work by artists across South and Southwest Asia, North Africa and their diasporas (15+ countries), grown from 50 to 300+ attendees over eight years.
Monthly tours for blind and low-vision South Asian community members, with Art-Reach and VisionLink; the only consistent programming of its kind in Philadelphia.
Of Oceans and Myths
A major new exhibition and public-humanities project with the University of Pennsylvania, placing contemporary diasporic artwork alongside the colonial archive across the Indian Ocean world.
Founded in 2023 by choreographer Nikka Maynard and fiscally sponsored by Fua Dia Kongo, Amazing Grace Dance Ministry grew out of Maynard's 3 decades of practice in Oakland's African diasporic dance community. It explores and celebrates the connections between West African dance and African American Praise Dance, two traditions that share deep ancestral roots and live side by side in Oakland.
An ongoing 75-minute dance-music project uniting Amazing Grace Dance Ministry and Diamano Coura West African Dance Company. The work traces the journey hidden inside Praise Dance, from the villages of West Africa through the Middle Passage to the churches of East Oakland. Commissioned by World Arts West in 2024, it debuted at the 2026 World Arts West Dance Festival.
Praise Dance Extravaganza
Presented at St. Paul AME Church in Berkeley on August 17, 2025, and at the Black Repertory Group Theatre in Berkeley on August 16, 2026.
Community Classes & Workshops
In Nikka's weekly classes at the Malonga Casquelourd Center and in free public Praise Dance workshops, participants learn the movement and the stories behind it, and in turn, their participation shapes the choreography.
Founded in 1973 out of the cultural reaffirmation of the Chicano Movement, the Asociación Nacional de Grupos Folklóricos is the national voice for the promotion and preservation of Mexican folklore traditions in dance, music and visual arts. ANGF has seeded generations of folklórico ensembles and teaching lineages across the US, and centers its California programming in the Central Valley under Vice-President Dr. Victor Torres.
A week-long gathering of some 450 practitioners, students and families from 17 states, learning regional dances, music and traditions from master instructors brought from Mexico; the 2027 conference will be held in Los Angeles, followed by Sacramento in 2028.
A 30-year-old coalition of Central Valley folklórico directors led by Dr. Torres, producing three major annual shows with Arte Américas, including the High School Showoffs, which featured 11 high schools in 2026.
Research and presentations on how Mexican folkloric dance advances social justice, preserves heritage and builds belonging, including emerging programs fusing folklórico with public health.
Beautiful Beginnings Arts Collective (BBAC) inspires artistic expression and gratitude for multicultural traditions, offering Bay Area youth visual, musical and movement art forms from across the African diaspora and Latin America. A grassroots collective rooted in San Francisco's Excelsior and Bayview neighborhoods and West Oakland, BBAC centers youth artistic development and the values of humility, respect and joy.
BBAC's flagship annual comparsa in the CarnavalSF parade; the inaugural 'Sea of Jubilee' (2023) drew 162 participants ages 4–86 and won first place in the Children & Youth category.
A stipended apprenticeship pairing youth leaders ages 14–21 from San Francisco's southeast neighborhoods with BBAC artist-mentors in costume design, stilt-dancing and West African drumming, building artistic skill and job readiness.
Free, culturally rooted arts programming with SF Community School (K–8 enrichment) and Community Well in the Excelsior, using traditional forms as a springboard for youth innovation and wellbeing.
Co-founded in 1984 by Krissy Keefer, Dance Brigade (popularly known as Dance Mission Theater) is an artist-driven, feminist organization rooted in intersectionality. From its home at 24th and Mission since 1998, it creates, presents and teaches multicultural feminist dance-theater, operating a 140-seat theater and three studios that serve over 30,000 people a year and support 110+ choreographers, most of them women and people of color.
An arts-education and leadership program (since 2004) empowering 275+ girls ages 6–18 a year from multicultural, low-to-moderate-income Mission District families through dance training, performance and paid internships.
A new dance-and-music work tracing Black American protest dance and music, from Gullah Geechee Ring Shout onto House and Hip Hop; premiering October 2027 at Dance Mission and the 24th/Mission BART Plaza.
A presenting program commissioning new social-justice dance works from San Francisco choreographers, staged at Dance Mission, the 24th/Mission BART Plaza and along the Mission Street corridor.
Dance Brigade's center of pedagogy and performance on the African Diaspora, convening culture bearers including Sarah Crowell, Amara Tabor-Smith, Ellen Sebastian Chang and Kara Mack for performances, workshops, panels and classes.
Dancing Cy(i)phers, directed by Oakland choreographer and scholar Latanya d. Tigner, is rooted in more than three decades of research into the retention of African dance within African American social dance, connecting the coded languages of African-rooted dance and building access, visibility and opportunity for African Diasporic dance forms.
An evening-length work premiered in 2025 at Jackson State University, receiving its Bay Area premiere in 2026 at Black Cultural Zone's Liberation Park, centering West African immigrant traditions and the legacy of HBCU marching bands.
Anansi's Web
A new dance-theater work drawing on the Anansi storytelling traditions of the African diaspora, rooted in Oakland and building toward a 2027 convening.
An annual gathering, in association with UC Berkeley, connecting the coded languages of African-rooted dance through open calls for artists, panelists and educators.
Founded in Oakland in 1972 and now in its 54th year under co-founder Deborah Vaughan, Dimensions Dance Theater is one of the oldest contemporary dance companies in the US. DDT creates, performs, heals and teaches dance reflecting the lives of Black people throughout the African Diaspora, blending traditional African dance with jazz and modern idioms and serving roughly 20,000 community members annually.
A multiyear socially-engaged dance series rooted in Sankofa; Healing to Joy III, with Alseny Soumah and Ben Tucker, premieres at the Malonga Casquelourd Center in October 2026 and tours Oakland in 2027.
DDT's award-winning, 33-year-old youth program serving over 1,000 children and youth annually with year-round dance classes, life-skills workshops, mentoring and cultural study trips.
Career training for participants ages 17–25 in dance, theater, management and technology, forming a pipeline from ROP student to teaching artist to company member.
inkBoat is a San Francisco physical-theater and dance company founded by Shinichi Iova-Koga in 1998, performing across North America, Europe, South Korea and Japan. Drawing from Japanese performing and martial arts, improvisational arts and Daoist internal arts, the six-time Isadora Duncan Award–winning company creates work bordering dance, performance art and theater.
An arts-based community wellness project with Wudang West and the SF Community Living Campaign, weaving Daoist physical practices into relationship with low-income Bay Area elders.
A dance work developed through extended engagement with Bay Area elder communities, culminating in full-length performances at Z Space (April–May 2026).
The Interlink Foundation is a Northampton, Massachusetts 501(c)(3) dedicated to sharing stories and writing from the Global South and historically under-resourced communities, preserving cultural heritage in the face of erasure. The nonprofit arm of Interlink Publishing, the only Palestinian-owned publishing house in the country, it has become the premier presenter of Palestinian and Arabic community events in Western Massachusetts.
An annual day-long outdoor festival at Interlink's Northampton headquarters with zine-making, screen printing, teach-ins, queer art vendors, a book sale and live music; draws over 1,000 attendees.
Formed in 2001, Kugelplex is the West Coast's last full-time working klezmer band, sustaining and evolving the diasporic traditions of klezmer and intersecting old-world musics. The Oakland-based ensemble plays wild, soulful dance music at concerts, festivals and Jewish lifecycle events across California, drawing on centuries of traditions spanning Europe, North Africa and the Middle East and building solidarity across cultures.
Founded in 1985 by Alleluia Panis, KULARTS (Kulintang Arts Inc.) is the premier presenter of contemporary and tribal Pilipino arts in the US, producing ambitious new dance-theater works, preserving ancient Pilipino art forms and mentoring artists from San Francisco's SOMA Pilipinas district, which it helped establish in 2016.
A new dance-theater work about two Pilipina nurses falsely accused of murder in the 1970s, reframing Pilipinx nurses' relationship to American empire; the opening performance for KULARTS' new community space in 2028.
A new work by Alleluia Panis exploring Pilipino relationships to the sea as a site of migration, labor, memory and cosmology, developed with Sama culture bearer Al-raffy Harun for a 2028 premiere.
Established 2009, serving young people ages 5–24 in Oakland's Fruitvale with free, sliding-scale instruction in Pilipino folkloric dance, kulintang music, rondalla ensemble and historical education.
Tubong for Living Ancestors
A community-based ritual honoring elders who fought for liberation, informed by traditional shamanistic practice.
Liberation Academy is a comprehensive cultural dance initiative that addresses the urgent need for platforms to uplift, educate, and inspire new generations of dancers and cultural practitioners from the African Diasporic community. The Liberation Academy was conceived to restore the intellectual scholarship, spiritual wisdom and creative richness which resides historically in Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color collective oral and underground traditions.
A season of workshops, mentorships, classes, and special commissions designed to enhance participants' technical skills, artistic expression, and understanding of the cultural, social, and historical contexts of the African Diaspora, engaging 200 all-level practitioners, including 20 "intensive track" participants each year.
Culture Bearers
Dance Brigade's center of pedagogy and performance on the African Diaspora, convening culture bearers including Sarah Crowell, Amara Tabor-Smith, Ellen Sebastian Chang and Kara Mack for performances, workshops, panels and classes.
Founded by Prof. Ernesto Martínez at Fresno State and directed by Dr. Victor Torres since 1997, Los Danzantes de Aztlán is the university's resident Mexican folklórico company and the only folklórico troupe in the CSU system designated an official ambassador of its university. Performing 22 times a year across the Central Valley alongside its youth company, the troupe has earned top honors in national and binational competitions while inspiring low-income, rural Latinx students to pursue higher education.
An annual summit bringing Central Valley high school folklórico students onto the Fresno State campus, building pathways from folkloric dance to college.
Torres-founded showcases uniting folklórico companies from across the CSU system and the state, including the statewide Festival de Los Danzantes conference.
Incorporated in 1979 to support choreographer and teacher Sara Shelton Mann, Mixed Bag Productions is a San Francisco laboratory for contemporary performance drawing on dance and music from many cultures. Led by Mann, an 82-year-old elder and pioneer whose ensemble Contraband helped define the Bay Area performance scene, MBP centers the belief that all bodies are creative bodies.
Projects
On Lok Always Active Partnership
Twice-weekly movement sessions across Bay Area sites engaging up to 50 senior and disabled community members per week as active co-creators, culminating in free site-specific community performances.
Hailing from Western Massachusetts and led by clarinetist Jason Ditzian, Myrtle Street Klezmer is an ecstatic exploration into the past, present and future of klezmer — the celebratory music of the Ashkenazi Jews. Its high-energy sound draws on Balkan, Greek, Arabic, rock and jazz alongside the classic and contemporary klezmer repertoire, sung in Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino. Since 2021 the band has connected with New England audiences through performances, workshops and presentations.
An annual festive concert and album-release celebration at the Iron Horse in Northampton, bringing klezmer music, dance and Yiddish song to New England audiences each December.
Educational performances across New England that teach the history, language and meaning of klezmer — in Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino — in the tradition of old-world klezmer musicians.
Founded in 2001 by co-artistic directors José Ome Mazatl Navarrete and Debby Kajiyama, NAKA Dance Theater creates interdisciplinary performance works exploring ritual, cultural studies and socio-political issues by and for immigrant and Indigenous communities. NAKA received the 2023 Alameda County Arts Leadership Award.
A full-length touring dance-theater work created and performed by Indigenous Maya Mam women of East Oakland, integrating personal narrative, movement, textile art and poetry.
A festival and gallery exhibition showcasing the Maya Mam women's learning circles, led by culture bearers Maria Vicente and Francisca Vicente Jimenez.
A site-specific project and artist residency exploring migration and underground networks, convening social-practice artists centering race and resistance.
Founded in 2007 by Eric Solano, Parangal Dance Company ('tribute') gives tribute to Philippine heritage by preserving and promoting Indigenous attire, music and dance, working closely with culture bearers in California and the Philippines to transform sacred ritual into contemporary dance-theater.
A new full-length work with 18 dancers, 6 musicians and 2 Indigenous culture bearers centering Kalinga cultural practices, premiering October 2026 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
The culmination of four years documenting and staging the pre-Islamic Maguindanaon Sagayan healing ritual, now extending through documentary film, a community ritual, touring and an archiving initiative.
Founded by Kiazi Malonga, Pelisa Arts & Energy is an Oakland nonprofit using arts, ancestral cultural practice and sustainability to empower the African diasporic community. Pelisa preserves and celebrates the music, dance and traditions of the Kongo Kingdom while responding to present-day needs, continuing the Saturday drumming and dance classes Kiazi's father began nearly four decades ago at the Malonga Casquelourd Center.
A free, year-round event series for Black and Brown fathers and their children, rooted in the mbongui healing traditions of the Kongo Kingdom and supported by licensed therapists of color at every gathering.
A cultural-restoration and research initiative reconnecting the Bay Area Kongo community with the Democratic Republic of the Congo through study, documentation and exchange.
Founded in 2007 under artistic director Sarah Bush, Sarah Bush Dance Project (SBDP) is an Oakland contemporary dance company known for emotionally resonant, multimedia dance-theater centering queer, feminist and intersectional narratives. A multiracial, intergenerational, queer-led company, SBDP specializes in site-responsive and immersive performances alongside regular community dance classes throughout the Bay Area.
A multiyear public performance and research project, developed with the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, documenting and celebrating Oakland's dyke, lesbian and queer histories through site-specific dance, archival research and interactive digital mapping.
A full-length dance-theater work performed on a softball field, where dancers embody Bay Area dyke and lesbian ancestors; premiering in 2026 at Rikki Streicher Field (SF) and Bushrod Park (Oakland).
Founded in 2018 and led by dancer-choreographer Shruti Abhishek, Shruti Abhishek Dance sustains and evolves the South Indian classical tradition of Bharatanatyam in the Bay Area through performance, presenting and education, reclaiming and recontextualizing a historically courtesan art form and passing the tradition to the next generation of the Bay Area's South Asian community.
A new full-length dance-theater work for solo dancer with an original score by Sindhu Natarajan, blending Bharatanatyam with contemporary themes of intimacy, myth, memory and where women turn when even goddesses fall short.
A community-engaged dance-theater program created with Narika, the Bay Area South Asian women's organization, generating narratives from Indian immigrant women survivors of domestic violence through weekly workshops in movement, music and poetry.
Founded in 2019, the only South Asian choreography festival in San Francisco, showcasing Bharatanatyam, Kathak, Odissi, Chhau, contemporary Indian and fusion forms from across the diaspora.
Founded by Anne Bluethenthal, Skywatchers practices relational, community-engaged performance rooted in San Francisco's Tenderloin, joining professional artists with the neighborhood's most marginalized residents as co-creators and using dance, music, story and ritual as acts of radical justice and revolutionary love.
Projects
Beyond the Shadow World
A new evening-length work created with Tenderloin residents, with culminating performances planned for 2027.
SPACE has served rural Mendocino County youth and families continuously since 1995, thirty years, reaching approximately 9,100 people each year, and has served the Latinx community through fifteen Spanish-language productions since 2015 and the Pomo community through Cultural Performance Projects, Pomo Arts Summer Circus Camps, and Yaʔ Bayo:yin. Young people study with the same teaching artists for years, move from student to teen intern to paid teaching artist, and return as parents bringing their children.
Projects
Yaʔ Bayo:yin (Our Gathering)
A free intergenerational Pomo cultural circle led by Sherwood Valley Pomo culture bearer Buffie Campbell, where participants weave, harvest wild foods and medicine, make regalia, and speak Northern Pomo.
Viva La Cultura
SPACE's Spanish-language performing arts program led by Olivia Zamora and Ignacio Ayala, which brings Latinx families together to create and perform work about identity, family, and community.
Founded in Washington, DC in 2007 by Vijay Palaparty and co-led with Dr. Nalini Prakash, Assistant Clinical Professor and Program Director of Drexel University's graduate program in Dance/Movement Therapy & Counseling, Spilling Ink creates immersive multidisciplinary art experiences rooted in classical Indian dance. Combining the classical Indian arts with Prakash's groundbreaking clinical research in arts and health, the company bridges the worlds of mental health and racial and social justice through performances, research and advocacy.
A multiyear series of community-engaged dance performances pairing classical Indian dance with dance/movement therapy across stages of life (The Child, The Mother, Places, Indigeneity), culminating in October 2026.
The Yogini Project
A new evening-length work with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts, animating the museums' 2028 yogini exhibition through Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam, original music and visual art.
Voice & Vision of the Child
A participatory program amplifying children's voices through dance, writing and design, developed with ATD Fourth World and now adapted for Washington, DC elementary schools.
Sri Thina Subramaniam is a distinguished performing artist, educator, curator, and Artistic Director of The Temple of Fine Arts - USA, an esteemed performing arts organization based in New York City and Jersey City. With over 30 years dedicated to teaching and practicing traditional classical Indian dance, Sri Thina is celebrated for her profound expertise in two distinguished Indian classical dance styles, Bharatanatyam and Odissi. Her work often explores the intersection of tradition and contemporary identity, particularly within the Indian diaspora.
Projects
It's [Not] Easy
A monologue-in-motion, a raw, unflinching portrayal of motherhood. Told through contemporary movement grounded in classical Indian form, the piece confronts the extremities of maternal experience: overwhelming love, unspoken rage, relentless labor, and deep isolation.
A new interdisciplinary dance production that reinterprets the Radha–Krishna narrative from the 12th-century Gita Govinda through a contemporary, female-centered lens. Blending Odissi and Bharatanatyam with live music performed on Western instruments, the work explores devotion, desire, and the complexities of womanhood within Indian mythology.
A work first conceptualized by Mavin Khoo and O.S. Arun, and originally choreographed and performed by Mavin Khoo in 2012. Rooted in devotion, memory, and embodied ritual, the piece transcends the moment of its creation, speaking to enduring questions of faith, surrender, and identity.
A unique way for children to learn about the global and historical significance of dances from India and the Indian diaspora in a way that is fun and relatable, offered to students in public, charter, and private schools (Pre-K to Grade 12) and community-based organizations.
Founded in Oakland in 2016 after the Ghost Ship fire that killed 36 artists, Vital Arts works to transform the conditions that led to that tragedy so artists pushed to the margins can not only survive but thrive. Led by Sharmi Basu, this majority-BIPOC, majority-queer organization advocates for and resources the artists most often excluded through grants, performances, advocacy and community ownership.
Projects
Dabke Drag Drums ≠ Displacement
A year-long community-engaged performance project led by artist Shams Amal, fusing Palestinian/Syrian/Lebanese line dance with drag, drumming and housing-justice organizing, building toward an evening-length world premiere.
Founded in 1978 and led by CEO Dr. Anne Huang, World Arts West serves the largest world dance and music network in the United States. A wraparound cultural-artist service provider, WAW supports cultural artists sustaining the world's diverse dance traditions while connecting the public to the chance to experience and learn about the world's cultures.
The country's first and most successful multicultural dance festival (formerly the SF Ethnic Dance Festival), presenting weekends of free performances, artist dialogues and workshops at venues including the Presidio Tunnel Tops and Dance Mission Theater.
A national regranting initiative, through a Wallace Foundation partnership, directing roughly $1 million in general operating support to 40 grassroots BIPOC arts organizations in a cohort-based, peer-learning model.
An artist-service cohort training 12 cultural artists per year in grant writing and fundraising; since 2022, participants have collectively raised over $2 million in first-time funding.
Support for mid-career choreographers producing ambitious large-scale work, including Nikka Maynard's 'Amazed by Grace' and Ishami Dance's 'Kal (Memory of Tomorrow).'
Narluga Arts
