Voice of Dance - About Us

Lori Smith Sparrow

Ten years ago, Lori Smith Sparrow founded Voice of Dance.com with investment banker F. Warren Hellman. The site is now considered one of the premiere dance sites on the web and Ms. Sparrow was recently interviewed in The New York Times on the subject of dance and the Internet.

Prior to founding Voice of Dance, Ms. Sparrow was a consultant for non-profit organizations and accumulated extensive experience in capital campaign strategy, major gift development, corporate sponsorship and giving strategies.

As the Capital Campaign Director for San Francisco Ballet, she was responsible for a $27.5 million capital campaign that became the most successful ballet campaign in history when it raised over 33 million dollars.

She was also the Major Gifts Director and Corporate and Foundation Director at the California Academy of Sciences - one of the ten largest natural history museums in the world and one of the oldest in the United States. During her service, she exceeded fundraising goals each year and succeeded the fundraising goal by one hundred percent in her last year of service.

Ms. Sparrow holds a B.A. in Psychology and Honors in the Issues of the 20th Century from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the graduate of the Outward Bound Sailing School in Hurricane Island, Maine and The Fundraising School's Major Gifts and Planned Giving programs. She has received an E-Commerce Certificate from the Haas School of Business and graduated from Stanford University's Advanced Management School. She lives in Marin County with her husband and two daughters.

Warren Hellman

F. Warren Hellman, Co-Founder and Chairman

F. Warren Hellman is the Chairman of Hellman & Friedman LLC, a private equity firm based in San Francisco with additional offices in New York and London. The firm, which he co-founded in 1984, is currently investing its sixth fund, Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners VI, L.P., with over $8 billion of committed capital. Through its 23 year history, Hellman & Friedman has raised and managed more than $16 billion in capital. Hellman & Friedman's objective is to invest long-term equity capital to support the strategic and financial objectives of outstanding management teams operating businesses with defensible positions in growing markets.

From 1977 to 1982, Mr. Hellman was a general partner of Boston-based venture capital firm Hellman, Ferri Investment Associates. From 1982 to 1985 he was a general partner of Matrix Partners (the successor to Hellman, Ferri). From 1962 to 1977, Mr. Hellman was a partner at Lehman Brothers in New York, where he served as head of Lehman's Investment Banking Division and president and director of Lehman Brothers.

Mr. Hellman is a director of various public and private companies including Levi Strauss & Co.; D.N. & E. Walter & Co.; Sugar Bowl Corporation and others.

Mr. Hellman's civic and philanthropic activities include serving as past Chairman and present trustee of The San Francisco Foundation; Co-Chair of the Governor's Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth and Member of the Governor's Council of Economic Advisors; member of the Advisory Board of the Walter A. Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley; trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation, trustee emeritus of The Brookings Institution; board member of the Committee on JOBS; board member of the S.F. Chamber of Commerce and Bay Area Council; Chairman, Voice of Dance; and board member of salesforce.com/foundation. In 2005 Mr. Hellman was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Mr. Hellman twice completed the Western States Endurance Run, a 100-mile foot race from Squaw Valley to Auburn, and five times completed the Tevis Cup, a 100-mile horse race over the same course. He is also a five-time age group national champion in Ride and Tie (combination of cross-country running and endurance horseback riding). He lettered at UC Berkeley in Water Polo. He is also a 5 string banjo player and is the Founder and Principal sponsor of the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

Mr. Hellman is a graduate of the University of California in Berkeley (1955) and Harvard Business School (1959).

Janet Michener

As the editor of Voice of Dance, Janet assigns, writes, edits and produces news and features and scours the web each day for news of the dance world for the Daily Dance Wire. To send her press materials, pitch story ideas and offer feedback, email editorial@voiceofdance.com.

Janet studied English at the University of Missouri-Columbia and has worked for the Columbia Daily Tribune and the arts and entertainment section of the San Francisco Chronicle. She trained in Cecchetti, pointe, pas de deux, jazz, modern and tap and performed in her local dance company before attending college. She resides in Marin with her family and two cats.

Rob Capili

Robert Capili is a dancer and software developer who has been working with the internet since 1992. He started his first internet consulting company while in college and served as the first online editor for the Oklahoma Daily.

After earning a degree in Letters, he moved west to pursue fame and fortune in the tech boom of the 90's. During that time, he wrote articles for Wired online, spoke at conferences, and consulted for various companies, large and small.

Tired of the cold water surf, Rob moved to Hawaii in 2000 in order to enjoy better waves and warmer weather.

While working in Honolulu, he designed and built one of the world's first mobile MLS systems, allowing real estate agents full access to listing data on their cell phones and PDA's. He also developed content management systems that were used to power projects for the government of Japan, Hilton Hawaiian Village, YellowPages.com, and Bank of Hawaii.

Rob is currently the Chief Technologist for Voice of Dance. He enjoys using new and emerging technologies to create interesting applications that are fun to use and profitable to deploy. Current areas of interest include social networking, geolocation, and monetization. Rob's work has been cited in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal Online, front page of Digg and other publications of ill repute.

When he is not programming, he enjoys dancing Salsa, training Jiu Jitsu, and spending time with his wife and kids.

Carmen Carnes

Carmen Carnes has thoroughly enjoyed holding the post of Web Producer at Voice of Dance for the last five years. She has also done freelance PR work for Bay Area dance companies and presenters such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In her not so spare time, Carmen is artistic director of Carmen Carnes Dance Ensemble, a contemporary dance company based in San Francisco that creates experimental contemporary work informed by an Eastern aesthetic. Carmen studied in the MFA program in the department of World Arts and Cultures/ Dance at UCLA and received her B.A. in dance from Mills College in 1995. She is extensively trained in modern/contemporary dance and ballet as well as Indian dance and music, Persian dance, Balinese dance, yoga, meditation, and rhythmic gymnastics. Her choreography has been presented in festivals and showcases in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and in Europe. She presented her first home season at the Cowell Theater in 2007. Carmen is the proud mom of beautiful a 6-month old baby boy named August Christopher.

Allan Ulrich

Allan Ulrich, who, by his own estimate has delivered more than 400 reviews and commentaries to Voice of Dance since he started writing for it in 2001, served as dance critic for both the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle from 1980-2002. He has written on dance for the Financial Times (London), New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde (Paris), Dance Magazine, Playbill, Ballet News and Dance International. He has written program notes on dance, freelances for dance publications here and abroad, has lectured to students on dance writing, has served on panels for the Dance Critics Association, of which he is a long-time member and has broadcast on dance for National Public Radio. He is a senior advising editor for Dance Magazine. He was also music critic for the San Francisco Examiner from 1987-2000, and has contributed articles on classical music for a wide variety of local, national and international publications. He lives in Oakland, California, and can be reached at allanu815@aol.com

Anna Kisselgoff

Anna Kisselgoff writes New York dance reviews for Voice of Dance. In 1977, she was named Chief Dance Critic of The New York Times. Earlier, she had been a dance critic and cultural news reporter for the paper and she continued as a staff writer until leaving The Times at the end of 2006, though she remains a contributor to the Times.

Over the years, she has reviewed ballet, modern dance, folk dance, ethnic dance, tap dance, Michael Jackson and at the 1988 Olympics, ice dancing and the rodeo. Prior to joining the New York Times, she wrote dance reviews and a range of features for the New York Times International Edition and worked on the English desk of Agence-France Presse in Paris. Ms. Kisselgoff began studying ballet in New York at the age of four with Valentina Belova, later head of the dance department at Sullins College. She studied ballet for nine years in New York with Jean Yazvinsky, a former dancer in Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College, Ms. Kisselgoff studied French History at the Sorbonne and Russian at the School of Oriental Languages in Paris. She received an M.A. degree from Columbia University in European History and an M.S. from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Ms. Kisselgoff was named a Knight of the Order of the Dannebrog by Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government. The President of Iceland personally awarded her the Order of the Falcon. Other awards for her writing include the Distinguished Alumni Award from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, an Honorary Doctorate from Adelphi University and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Achievement from the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Ms. Kisselgoff has taught at Yale University and Barnard College. She served as consultant and wrote the foreword for Bronislava Nijinska: Early Memoirs.

Tobi Tobias

Asked to introduce herself, Tobi Tobias said, "My writing is my 'letter to the world.'" Tobi Tobias, an internationally known dance writer, is the New York dance critic for Bloomberg News. She also writes about dance in New York for Voice of Dance.

Much of her work appeared in Dance magazine (where she also edited the criticism for nearly a decade) and in New York magazine (where she served as the journal's dance critic for 22 years). She has also reviewed dance regularly for the Village Voice and written feature stories for the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times.

Her involvement with dance has extended to major oral history projects as well as writing for the public television series Dance in America and Live from Lincoln Center. In 1992, she was awarded a Danish knighthood in recognition of her extensive writing and oral history project on the Royal Danish Ballet and its Bournonville tradition.

Her dance writing of recent years is archived on Seeing Things, her site at ArtsJournal, where she also writes reviews, features, and essays originally done for that site. There she has just inaugurated a series called Personal Indulgences, which are sometimes about dance, sometimes not.

In the course of a parallel career in writing for children, she has published over two dozen books, most recently Wishes for You (2003), Serendipity (2000), and A World of Words (1999). For adults she written Obsessed by Dress (2000), a meditation on clothes. She also writes about vintage objects, chiefly in the realms of fashion, photography, and designs for living.

Mindy Aloff

Mindy Aloff writes New York City reviews for Voice of Dance. Her essays and journalism about theatrical dancing, literature, music, film, and other subjects related to the arts have been published in Dance Magazine, The Dance View Times, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, and many other periodicals in the U.S. and abroad. She is a past fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and a past winner of a Whiting Writers Award. She has also served as a consultant to The George Balanchine Foundation. Her anthology, Dance Anecdotes, was first published in 2006 by Oxford University Press and was brought into paperback by Oxford in 2007. She teaches dance criticism, dance history, and First-Year Seminar at Barnard College and is at work on Hippo in a Tutu, a study of dance sources in historic Disney animated films, for Disney Editions.

Barbara Newman

Barbara Newman writes a monthly review or column from London for Voice of Dance. Born in New York and a long-term resident of London, Barbara Newman currently reviews dance for Country Life magazine and covers musical theatre for the Dancing Times. Over the years, her reviews and essays have also featured in Dance Magazine, Dance Europe, Ballet Review, Dance International, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, on BBC Radio Four, and in reference works published in America, England and Germany. A former student of Richard Thomas and Merce Cunningham, she has served as an interviewer for the School of American Ballet's Oral Preservation Project and as a principal researcher for Popular Balanchine, an archival initiative by the George Balanchine Foundation. In her most recent book, Grace under Pressure (Limelight Editions), an international array of teachers, coaches and company directors add their comments on dance today to hers. Earlier titles include a volume of interviews with dancers, Striking a Balance, and for young readers, The Illustrated Book of Ballet Stories (Dorling Kindersley), now available in nine languages.

Brittany Delany

Brittany Delany communicates enthusiastic curiosity and a strong work ethic. She is a choreographer, dancer, and writer. She will graduate from Wesleyan University in May '09 with a double major in French Studies and Dance: Choreography & Performance.

Brittany is playful, daring, honest and funky--her movement reflects her personality. Her research in freestyle hip hop and contact improvisation challenges her questions about dance practice and performance. She works as Associate Editor of the Dance section of Hot Stepz Magazine --based out of Dorchester, MA.

Committed to a love of the performing arts, Brittany seeks creative ways to connect dance/movement/community/choreography/expanding engagement with embodi(soul)ment.