Core Teachers

Valerie Chafograck

Valerie Chafograck is a Black/mixed heritage, California-based embodiment and conscious dance facilitator. She has been teaching since 1992 and is the founder of Dance Sanctuary™, a highly attended weekly community dance and healing event in the Bay Area. Blending Soul Motion™ practice, somatic and social justice perspectives, she offers classes and workshops in the USA and abroad to advance personal & collective transformation, healing, and liberation.
Valerie is the founder of Movement Liberation: a project for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) curating embodied and somatic healing workshops and retreats for people of color. Movement Liberation has the power to bring about radical healing, and guide the way into a new global and racial paradigm, not just on the dance floor but in every aspect of its operations and partnerships, including fundraising.

Dominique Cowling

Dominique (she, her) is a Black Queer femme and Bay Area native dedicated to transforming trauma and violence into opportunities of freedom. For the past decade, she has been honored to learn & share liberatory tools for healing. Her former work as the Healing Justice Program Director at Community United Against Violence supported low income to no income queer and Trans survivors of intimate partner violence, hate violence and police violence through direct service and organizing. At CUAV, she provided peer counseling, seasonal healing programs, mentorship and community trainings. 

Her relationship to spirit and the natural world guides her work. She is the founder of Black Seeds Project, where she provides private and group sessions in the outdoors. Through these offerings, she weaves her studies in psychology, ecotherapy, mindfulness and trauma informed yoga to explore deeper intimacy. Each session is tailored to specific needs around emotional and spiritual health. Her heart swells thinking about the courage it takes to accept the invitation of building an authentic relationship with self, community and mama earth.

Sarah Crowell

Sarah Crowell has taught dance, theater and violence prevention for over 30 years. She recently left her position as the Artistic Director at Destiny Arts Center in Oakland, CA where she served in different capacities from 1990-2020, including Executive Director from 2002-2007. She founded and directed the Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company from 1993-2020, which has been the subject of two documentary films, and won the National Arts & Humanities Youth Program Award. Sarah has facilitated arts integration, violence prevention, cultural humility and team building professional development sessions with artists and educators since 2000, both locally and nationally. She is the recipient of the KPFA Peace award, the KQED Women’s History Local Hero award, the Bay Area Dance Week award, the Alameda County Arts Leadership award, and the National Guild for Community Arts Education Milestone award. She is also a four-time nominee for a Tony Award for Excellence in Theater Education. She has been a dedicated student of Soul Motion for 10 years.

India Harville

India Harville is an Access-Centered Movement dancer/performer, somatic practitioner, and bodyworker. The unifying thread in India’s work is facilitating people working with their bodies as a vehicle for personal and collective growth and transformation.  India has studied and teaches several styles of dance including, Nia, Zumba, Dancing Freedom, KiVo, DanceAbility, American DanceWheels, Wheelchair Ballroom, and Adaptive Stretching.  India seeks to complicate the conversation around what inclusivity in dance means to not just include superficial accessibility, but to also include chronically ill and disabled fat bodies, queer and genderqueer bodies, and all experience levels of dancers. Her aim is to help deconstruct hierarchical structures of dance and to interrupt the racism/ableism/heteronormativity/sizeism inherent in them. She wants to give dance back to the people, to all of the people. She believes if you can breathe, you can dance.  

Arisika Razak

Arisika Razak, CNM, MPH (Health Care Administration, UC Berkeley 1978, Certified Nurse Midwife, UC San Francisco 1980), is a Professor of Philosophy and Religion and Women's Spirituality, and past Director of the Women's Spirituality MA and PhD program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is also Director of Diversity at CIIS. Arisika is an African-American healer, ritualist, spiritual dancer, and educator who practices an eclectic mix of Earth-based spiritual traditions.

She has worked with indigent women as an inner-city nurse-midwife for more than 20 years, focusing on the lives and cultures of women of color, which has led to her research interest in feminist, womanist, mujerista, and postcolonial epistemologies and worldviews, and in women's health.

Arisika is a diversity trainer and spiritual dancer who leads spiritual and healing workshops. She has performed nationally and internationally; she was the 2008 American Association of Religion-Western Region's conference chair and vice president, and she is the organization's 2009 president.

Randy Miller

Randy Miller (He/Him) identifies as mixed heritage, Mexican/European descent queer/gay. He is a certified Soul Motion® Facilitator since 2011 and a 1st Degree Black Belt Nia® Teacher since 1999. When Randy is not dancing you can find him in the art studio using the intuitive painting process to explore his creative juices.

Randy’s intention as a movement facilitator is driven by the desire to hold a safe and sacred space for dancers searching to become whole again, and finding a place of unconditional love and acceptance. He believes dance and embodiment practices allow us to become liberated fellow human beings anchored in our heart place.

EveryOne and everyBody is a Dancer and Artist. So “DO YOU. Everyone else is taken” is Randy’s motto.