Zouk Nation - "Zouk is the dance of the 21st Century"

Nicholas, “The Duke of Zouk,” grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His background includes time spent at both Oxford and UCLA, where he graduated with a BA in directing for the theater. After leaving college, Nicholas spent three years studying and working overseas in Kyoto, Japan, where he became both the founder and creative director of the successful Dark Horse Theater Group. Despite having a long list of creative accomplishments, including screenwriter, playwright and director, he was only recently bitten by the dancing bug. After just six weeks of studying zouk, he hopped on a plane to check out the zouk community in Amsterdam. Upon his return to New York he started up Zouk Nation and he hasn’t looked back since.

Kristina was first introduced to Zouk when a friend from high school came to visit her in New York and announced “You have to learn this dance!” (And he was right, she is now shamelessly addicted.) She is grateful to all of the international Zouk teachers and dancers who have come though NYC for their lessons and inspiration.

Kristina has also studied and performed Classical Ballet, Oriental Bellydance, Turkish & Balkan Rromani (Gypsy) Dances, and Bachata.
She is a member of the Stagehands Union in NYC, where she works backstage on Broadway. You can read more about her artistic endeavors at her website, www.KristinaMelike.com.

Cyrus is an experienced web professional, excelling at developing complex and dynamic sites. He is thrilled to be a part of the Zouk Nation staff, and enjoyed developing this site. He hopes Zouk Nation will succeed in building the Zouk community and broadening awareness of the art form. As a self-taught programmer, Cyrus learned web development by working on his high school website back in St. Paul, MN, and by developing his own sites when he moved to New York City last year. He is now an active freelance developer, and advertises his services at web.cyruscollier.com.

Aria started dancing zouk/lambada, samaba, and salsa in 1997 and became hooked (especially to zouk). He stopped dancing zouk/lambada actively in 2000 and restarted in 2007. He currently works as an assistant instructor at the Sandra Cameron Dance Center in New York City. He is a multi-talented individual who is held in high regard by his colleagues in the New York scene.

Berg Chabot is a well known and respected photography in Holland who has been documenting the local zouk and salsa scene for years now. Many of his beautiful color photos can be found on the dance section of the Zouk Nation website.

Berg became interested in dancing when he was studying computer science at the university and looking for a distraction he became interested in salsa. He credits Claudio Gomes with being the person who originally got him hooked on zouk. Taking photos of the zouk scene he saw as just an opportunity to take his two passions -zouk and photography- and combine them into one. He originally started taking photos at a young age, but has never had no formal training as a photographer. He says that he just lets his eyes tell him if it’s a good photo or not.

Currently, he shoots about 300 pictures a week at zouk and salsa parties. As a result, he has about 25,000 photos on line, which can be viewed by going to his Flickr account at www.flickr.com/photos/berg-chabot/sets/