About Lumina Academy of Dance

The founder ofLuminaAcademy of Dance in Pasadena, CA, a community center for cultural exchange through dance, has a natural interest in intercultural understanding. In her native Argentina, co-owner and director Fatima Mendoza grew up with parents belonging to recent immigrant families from Syria and Spain. Most of Lumina Academy’s classes—in Brazilian samba, Spanish flamenco, Middle Eastern belly dance, and other international dance styles—are taught by natives of the countries the dances come from.

“I like to have hip hop here because I think that it’s really representative of the culture inL.A.,” Fatima says.

“It doesn’t stay in the dance class. It transcends.”

In recent years, hip-hop offerings have included a long-runningbreakdanceclass taught byBboyAnacron that we had hoped to cover on the site. Currently, there’s no class dedicated solely to hip-hop dance. We love this studio’s recognition of hip hop as an American cultural art and are confident thatLuminaAcademy shares our hope to see more of it return. So feel free to express your interest!

But hip hop isn’t the only American dance style Lumina Academy wants to offer. Fatima feels country dancing is an important root of American cultural dance, and she’s interested in adding a country line dancing class to enrich Lumina Academy’s representation of American heritage.

Fatima enjoys sharing the Syrian side of her heritage through teaching belly dance at the studio. Learning international dance styles, she says, inspires Lumina Academy’s students to take a deeper interest in the cultures that created them.

“It doesn’t stay in the dance class,” Fatima says. “It transcends.”

Lumina Academy tango students have traveled to Argentina to dance at amilonga(tango party), and a group of flamenco students visited Spain. Some of the studio’s belly dance students have traveled to Egypt.

Fatima now has a diaspora of students who took classes at Lumina Academy and later returned to their home countries. Many have continued with the dance styles they learned and still keep in touch.

Situated in a beautiful Pasadena neighborhood of broad streets and grassy lawns, Lumina Academy is one block north of Marshall Fundamental High School. Small local shops form a low-key one-block business district in this quiet residential neighborhood. Nearby streets are lined with homes, and in the evening neighbors walk their dogs past the studio. On the corner across the street from the high school, Lumina Academy welcomes dancers with its bright green awnings.

A Teacher’s Valentine

On Valentine’s Day 2010, one of the many e-mails Fatima received from her students was from a woman who had learned belly dance from her. The woman wrote that she had finally found a belly dance class in her home country, Korea.

Fatima was thrilled, as the belly dance student had been corresponding with her for a month, writing, “I am looking for the class and I am not finding it!”

“We just put a little seed there in her heart about this dance,” Fatima says. “And now she’s just letting it grow, as a beautiful plant.”

That, Fatima says, is the whole idea behind Lumina Academy.

Meet Fatima Mendoza

Lumina Academy co-owner and director Fatima Mendoza loves to spend time at home with her husband and young son and daughter. The family enjoys trying international dishes Fatima cooks from recipes her students suggest to her. Fatima performed the tango as a member of two professional dance companies in her native Argentina.

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