2024 Olympics Breakdancing Battle FRANCHESSKA BERRY guest Judge appearance Soul train Dancer

Cultural Program Manager | International Arts Educator | Events Producer Award-winning choreographer, educator and cultural award developer with 20 + years of experience producing and managing intercultural programming for government, arts, and non-profit organizations Franchesska Berry is an eloquent performer, choreographer, and international intercultural arts, educator. Franchesska specializes in dances and traditional culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora; however, her expertise is not limited to African based forms. Franchesska's unique dance style is informed by her comprehensive background in the western classical forms of ballet, modern, jazz and improvisational dance. Franchesska strives to integrate dance modalities as if dance were derived from a single root language and her styled modalities were innovative dialects.

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Franchesska developed her professorial expertise as an academic leader in international intercultural arts education, termed the Relational Model of Education. Her pedagogical approach is firmly rooted in the lineage and kinesthetic anthropology of African and African American dance and cultural history. Ms. Berry invites students into a process of a liberated understanding of African thought and history, anchored in West African cultures. Her dance-informed integrative work helps students and audiences reclaim what has been forgotten and distorted by design, and denied through colonial cancellation.

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Artistic Objective: Consolidate indigenous philosophy, scholarship and expressive practices from Africa, Australia, and Egypt in order to transmit through a relational model performance, mentorship and seek to highlight the essential value of putting the imagination and insight at the center of art which lives, breathes and transforms community.

Academic Achievements in Excellence: Franchesska earned the Distinguished Honor of Fulbright Fellow/Scholar to Cairo, Egypt at the Academy of Arts as artiste, choreographer for the Royal Ballet of Cairo and as professor, performer and lecturer of “Dance and The Relationship Model for A Multicultural Classroom” at the American University of Cairo, an American/African American critical pedagogy she fashioned into an intercultural arts program..

Antioch University, Seattle, WA Master’s in education & Social Sciences, June 2008 Thesis: The Philosophical Aspects of Cultural Differences Graduated Summa Cum Laud e with Distinguished Mention and Performance
The Evergreen State College, Olympia, WA BA in Liberal Arts, Education, June 2004 Thesis: Leadership Sustainability through Arts in Education​

International Resident Scholar/Teaching Residencies

Acadmeyet Du Arts of Cairo, Egypt 2009

American University Cairo 2009

University Cairo Egypt 2007

Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar 2007-8

Awarded the status of distinguished leader in The Necessities of Higher Academia & Education in
African Universities by the Dean of the University of Dakar.

Provided personal narrative cross-cultural lectures to introduce the National Ballet Du Senegal
performances at the University of Washington.

Cairns, Queensland, Australia 2005