Carina is a dance artist, educator, and scholar whose research examines the cultural histories and social practices of partner and social dance forms across the Americas. Her work investigates how vernacular traditions and embodied collaboration function as vital sites of cultural memory, community storytelling, and identity formation. Drawing from three decades of practice across jazz, tap, lyrical, musical theatre, competitive Ballroom and Latin dance, and a range of social dance forms, she approaches movement as both an analytic methodology and a lived archive of cultural and social exchange.

Her artistic and pedagogical inquiries intersect with cross‑cultural communication theory, Afro‑Caribbean dance and music traditions, somatic investigation, and studies of improvisation and social practice. Fieldwork in Panamá and China has deepened her understanding of dance as a critical mode of transnational dialogue, informing long‑term work in community‑based arts education as well as choreographic and instructional collaborations with professional musical theatre companies, K–12 arts programs, and immersive and experimental theatre.

Carina’s choreography, teaching, and research explore the intersections of language, culture, and embodied narrative, positioning dance as a methodology for generating, preserving, and reinterpreting knowledge. She views movement as both record and revelation—an embodied archive through which lived experience, cultural histories, and collective memory are carried forward and continually reimagined.

B.S in Liberal Studies, Northern Arizona University
M.F.A. in Dance, Montclair State University