Ana Garcia

Ana “Rokafella” Garcia was born in Spanish Harlem where she grew up with a strong Latin background. She represents the positive image of a woman confident in both her Puerto Rican and Hip-Hop cultures. She participated in school recitals and community events. At the age of 16 she began going to clubs and started to do back up dancing for freestyle singers in the local NYC party scene. She began street performing with crews such as The Transformers, The Breeze Team, and the New York City Float Committee. In ’94 she ran into Kwikstep who urged her to audition for GhettOriginal- a Hip-Hop dance company. As a member, she became further exposed to the “old school” dance technique. After experiencing international appreciation for Hip-Hop, she decided to offer classes back home to prevent its fading away. She has taught workshops at NYU, Queens College, MIT, UMASS, Howard and Eugene Lang College The New School, as well as neighborhood high schools and community centers. The nonprofit company she co founded with her husband, Full Circle Prod, serves the community with concert/theatrical performances and mentorship programs, which she helps produce and direct. Full Circle Prod presented Soular Power’d at Broadway’s New Victory Theater. Rokafella co-hosted an Internet radio show, 88 Hip-Hop, through which she interviewed Hip-Hop pioneers in her Hip-Hop History segment. In the past years she has been singing and rhyming in English and Spanish with her band as La Roka, and had a supporting role in the independent film On the Outs. She wrote the introduction to Martha Cooper’s We B*Girls photo book and has been hired by the US State Department as a cultural envoy artist.She is presently producing All The Ladies Say, a documentary about b girls. Personal items from her dance career were included in the “Urban Archive – Then and Now” collection at the Bronx Museum 2009-2010.

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