Amelia is a choreographer, community leader and dancer/athlete. Her work is informed by aesthetics, non-traditional relationships with gravity, ecology, natural and built spaces, community and human relationships. She founded BANDALOOP in 1991, bringing together dance, climbing and varied off-the-ground movement through site-reactive work on cliffs, urban structures and in theaters. She is a co-leader for Creative Capital’s Professional Development Program, teaches youth in Oakland through Destiny Art Center, is an active and dynamic performer, and serves on the board of Dance USA.

Amelia holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in comparative religion from Swarthmore College and the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Her intellectual and artistic sensibilities inform her work inspiring practical, spiritual, theoretical and political creativity. Her choreography has explored dance in theaters and on buildings and cliffs all over the US and around the world. Amelia is continually challenged and inspired by her experiences in nature, with her dancers and with communities that unearth and clarify her values, identity and art.

Since 2000 she has been named an Irvine Fellow and awarded funding and commissions from the National Dance Project, Creative Capital, National Performance Network, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Creative Work Fund, San Francisco Foundation, the Irvine Creation to Performance Program, City of Oakland, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, and The Center for Cultural Innovation among others. In 2009 she received a major commission with Aeriosa from the Arts Partners in Creative Development in Canada as part of the Cultural Olympiad. In 2010-11 the company was awarded major grants from the Rainin, Wattis and Irvine Foundations as well as the San Francisco Arts Commission, for new work for BANDALOOP’s 20th anniversary season in 2011. BANDALOOP is a multi-year grant recipient for organizational support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.