Mira minored in dance at Mills College in the 1980s and completed her MFA in Dance/ Creative Practice at Saint Mary’s College of California in 2019. Her written MFA thesis: “Understory Dances: Building Community through Site-Specific and Interspecies Creative Practices,” is available here. The site-specific performance of Understory Dances was filmed at an equine experiential education facility in Sonoma County, California, in September 2018.

Since the early 2000s, Mira has been researching and writing about dance and arts-based learning. Supported by a Robert Bowne Foundation grant, her study of community-based dance education, “Growth in Motion: Supporting Young Women’s Embodied Identity and Cognitive Development through Dance After School,” appeared in the journal, Afterschool Matters, published by Wellesley’s National Institute on Out-of-School-Time (NIOST).  Mira’s edited book, Moving Ideas: Multimodality and Embodied Learning in Communities and Schools, was published by Peter Lang in 2013 and is available through Amazon.

Mira began studying yoga and dance when she was in her teens. She continues to study yoga, ballet, modern dance, and Pilates. Though she is grateful to all her teachers, she especially appreciates these extraordinary individuals and organizations: Lucas Hoving, Beth Hoge at Danspace in Oakland, CA, Ernesta and Andra Corvino, Mercy Sidbury, The Yoga Room and Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley, CA, and Nest Yoga, in Oakland.

As a choreographer and working artist, I strive to stretch my own and others’ experiential repertoires through shared kinesthetic/aesthetic engagement and, in so doing, build empathy as we discover new ways to speak and listen, comprehend and interpret, interrupt and negotiate understandings of our shared worlds.