Barbara Grant

The Gilded Serpent presents...

Barbara Grant

Barbara Grant began her performing career as an actor in the San Fernando Valley, taking every drama class she could find, and performing in a variety of plays and shows. She began professional training in dramatic arts with the Northridge Theatre Guild, Northridge, CA at ten years of age. Her interests shifted to math and science, and she earned a B. A. in Mathematics from San Jose State University in 1983, and an M. S. in Optical Sciences from the University of Arizona in 1989.

Barbara began serious study of Middle Eastern dance in 1990. She has had the opportunity to study with a number of fine instructors, including Baraka (San Francisco), Rhea (Athens, Greece), and Carmen Evans (Tucson, AZ). She favors the Egyptian style of dance, and has studied it with Amina Goodyear (San Francisco) and Leyla Lanty (East Palo Alto).

Barbara completed Baraka’s Teacher Training Certification in Bastet Oriental Dance and began teaching professionally in 2000 at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, forming the “Wings of the Desert” dance troupe. A second troupe formed from her students at The Training Zone in Tucson performed at Race for the Cure, an annual event raising awareness of breast cancer. She acted in Tucson’s Trail Dust Town Halloween Haunted House for the three seasons of its run, 2005 – 2007. She taught classes at Tucson’s Canyon Ranch Health Resort and most recently, at 4EverFit Personal Training Studio in Saratoga, CA.

Barbara has written several articles and reviews which have appeared in Gilded Serpent and in Habibi Magazine under her former stage name, Basheera.  

E-mail: barbara_dance(at)att.net

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