About Paufve Dance

Mission

Paufve Dance is a contemporary dance organization dedicated to creating intimate portraits of humanity through the rigorous craft of choreography.

Since 2001, Choreographer Randee Paufve has created dances exploring themes of womanhood, community, and resilience. Her works have been performed in a variety of spaces ranging from theater stages and public parks to bars and nightclubs.

Paufve Dance regularly hosts open workshops and rehearsals that invite dancers of all levels to celebrate their bodies and explore their inner worlds. Through its programs, Paufve Dance strives to honor the rigor of choreography and deepen the connections between movement, meaning, and imagination.

To reclaim feminism through dance, as a progression toward freedom of choice, gender diversity, and bodily autonomy.  

To build community through teaching that prioritizes joy, rigor, and accessibility to all bodies, ages, levels, and abilities.

To collaborate with dancers in creating meticulously and thoughtfully crafted choreography.

To honor our basic human need to move and connect — in this body, in this moment, with these people — treating the here and the now as essential, sacred, and irreplaceable. 

To teach and make dances as an act of hope in the midst of massive global change and uncertainty that echoes through every community and every body. 

Photographer:  Stephen Texeira

Randee Paufve
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
(2002-present)

  • Artistic Director Randee Paufve is a 2019-2020 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar Award grantee. Paufve, a featured artist on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, was named one of five dance artists in San Francisco Magazine’s 2017 “100 Artists Putting the East Bay On The Map.” Paufve received the 2015 Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Outstanding Individual Performance; previous works have received 7 nominations total, in multiple categories.  Paufve was awarded the inaugural Della Davidson Prize for Innovations in Dance-Theater and has been nominated for the Theatre Bay Area Choreography award for her work with San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater. A two-time recipient of the E.E. Ford award for dance research in Europe, Paufve’s choreography has also been supported by residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California, Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, and Red Cinder Creativity Center in Hawaii. From 2010-2020 Paufve Dance was Company-In-Residence at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center in Berkeley.

    Paufve’s choreography has been commissioned and produced by (select list) San Francisco’s ODC Theater, SummerfestDance and The West Wave Dance Festival, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, University of San Francisco, the Mondavi Performing Arts Center, Joyce SoHo Theater/Manhattan, Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts, On The Boards/Seattle, Max10 in Los Angeles, Dance Complex in Boston, Phantom Theater in Vermont, the Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, Madurai Art Fest 2020, Madurai, Tamilnadu, India, and the Fulbright South and Southeast Asian Conference, Kochi, Kerala, India.

    Paufve graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Elmira College, with a degree in Cross-Cultural Performing Arts. She spent her junior year in Madurai, Tamil Nadu through the University of Wisconsin’s College Year in India program.  She holds an MA in Dance from the State University of New York, Brockport, and an MFA in Dramatic Arts from the University of California Davis where she was supported by a full scholarship and the UC Davis Humanities Graduate Research Award.

  • Randee Paufvee CV

ADVISORY BOARD

  • Jyoti Argade is an educator, producer, and Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging practitioner. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and was formerly a professor of dance at the University of East London, UK. Trained in the classical Indian dance form of bharata natyam, she stays connected to dance via the studio and as an advisor to dance companies and emerging choreographers. Currently, she is a Culture, Diversity and Belonging Manager at Autodesk. Dr. Argade is also the proud mother to a 6 year old boy and 9 year old girl.

  • Josh Kaufman is a communications and group engagement consultant. As a partner and owner of Covision he has served corporate, non-profit, and NGO clients across the globe at events ranging from small group gatherings to the opening session at the World Economic Forum. Josh has been an enthusiastic patron of Paufve Dance for the past 25 years, was MC for one of the first 8x8x8 performances, and is excited to bring his mix of business acumen and love for the arts to the board. In his spare time, Josh loves to run, ski, climb, play at improv, strum the guitar, and travel. Josh lived abroad in Spain for several years but is now settled in Berkeley with his wife Ana and their dog Blai.

  • Maya Woodson Turman is a finance professional, a modern dancer and a yoga instructor. She lives in Kensington with her husband, her two kids and her dog, Obi. She is as passionate about dance and the arts as she is a great excel spreadsheet. She has danced with Paufve Dance in the past and continues to study with Randee each Sunday morning. She is excited to be able to combine her passions by serving on the Paufve Dance advisory board as a supporter of dance and the arts and as a finance professional.

Photo by Sophie Leininger / courtesy of ODC

  • Sima Belmar earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from TDPS in 2015, and holds an M.F.A. in Dance from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Her scholarly writing has been published in The Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, Performance Matters, L'avventura, and the Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies (2016). Sima was a dance critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian from 1997-2003. Currently, she is the creator and host of the ODC podcast Dance Cast. She has taught dance on film and television, dance history, performance theory, modern dance technique, and college writing at several institutions including UC Berkeley, St. Mary's College of California, Sonoma State University, Mills College, Austin Peay State University, Shawl Anderson Dance Center, Berkeley Ballet Theater, and IALS (Roma). Her research foci include the relationship between dance, talk, and gesture in North American concert dance, Dance in Popular Film and Television, Somatic Theory/Practice/Pedagogy, Performance and Phenomenology, and embodied research methods.

  • Stephen Texeira is a Massachusetts-based photographer. He began taking photographs more than 40 years ago. For the past 15 years he has focused his photography on the San Francisco Bay Area dance community. Throughout a career that has included working as a journalist in Chicago and San Francisco; nonprofit communications and management; and running a marketing consulting firm specializing in hospitals and clinics throughout California, Stephen has focused on communicating ideas and images that move others to action. He has expertise in a vast array of fields, including health care; transportation; animal welfare; non-profit, community-based organizations; and the legal profession. He has particular expertise in the areas of data analysis; internal and external audits; strategic planning; and media training and branding.