Amanda Gill

Amanda Gill is DC Casineros’ Founding and Former Artistic Director, a choreographer and a Current Instructor. She founded the company in 2005 and continues to contribute through instruction, including children’s classes at Glen Echo. A professional dancer with a background in ballet and modern dance and extensive Afro-Cuban dance training, her current teaching focuses on Casino and Son. She is highly skilled in Afro-Cuban modern dance techniques, including their use in warm-ups, and can also teach Rumba and other Cuban popular dances.

With Adrian in Vancouver

Her experience of community connection through Rueda de Casino led her to explore its relationship to dance/movement therapy in graduate school.

Raised in northern Virginia, Amanda trained in ballet, modern dance, and African dance, and performed with Ashe Moyubba, George Mason University Dance Company, and Carla & Company. Her studies at George Mason University and educational travel with professor Jim Lepore to Santiago de Cuba opened a lasting connection to Cuban popular and social dance. In 2004 she continued her studies in Havana at the Instituto Superior de Arte, practiced daily with a neighborhood Rueda de Casino team and appeared on the Cuban television program Para Bailar Casino. That first Rueda performance was an early milestone in the journey that led her to found DC Casineros.

Amanda’s Cuban dance training has included Aramis Pazos and Oscar Rousseaux. In Santiago de Cuba, she studied Haitian dance with Cutumba and Casino styling with Yanek Revilla. She has shared that training through teaching at Dance Place, DC Dance Collective, congresses, schools and festivals. Capital Congress · 2012.

Amanda’s movement style draws on the body isolations of Son and rumba, Orisha dance traditions, and modern dance. She earned an MA in Dance/Movement Therapy from Lesley University, worked as a family therapist in Boston, and taught Rueda de Casino at the Masacote School. In 2012 she returned to Washington to co-direct, teach, and perform with DC Casineros.

Amanda’s 2011 master’s dissertation at Lesley University examined group social dance and relationships between hospital staff and patients. This research brought her Rueda de Casino practice into conversation with dance/movement therapy and her interest in building connection through shared movement. Explore Amanda’s professional work.

Her festival history includes participation on the Cubamemucho staff in Europe with Adrian Valdivia and Patricia Rivera in 2009, and the Ritmos Latinos Indiana Workshop & Fiesta with Adrian in April 2016. She brings her dance and family programming experience to DC Casineros’ youth and family programs.