Grantee Database

LUNA KIDS DANCE INC

Grant Year

2025-26

Grant Program

General Operating Support

Award Amount

$15,300.00

Project Description

Funding for Luna Dance and Creativity (“Luna,” formerly Luna Dance Institute) would support culturally responsive, anti-biased dance education programs for children, families, educators, artists, and agencies from underserved communities across California. PROFESSIONAL LEARNING provides intensive, holistic training to teachers, fostering leadership, creative self-efficacy, and equity. FIELD MOVING advances justice through practice-to-policy strategies, research dissemination, and advocacy rooted in community collaboration. Through PARTNERSHIPS, Luna works with schools, districts, and organizations to build sustainable, equity-focused dance programs. Luna’s EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION program promotes developmentally informed, intercultural learning grounded in neuroscience and play theory. STUDIO LAB offers dance-making classes for children and adults, free family classes, panels, and works-in-process showcases. As a 33-year old anchor organization, Luna serves individual artists and dance organizations, who are especially at risk during our current economic uncertainty and lack of federal support.

Organization Summary

Our ADA-accessible STUDIO LAB children’s program offers a progression of dance learning designed to nurture the choreographer in every child in a studio class structure at Luna’s studios in Berkeley. The STUDIO LAB adult program offers opportunities for and presentations on dance research, the choreographic process, and topics that expand ideas about what dance is and who can dance.

PROFESSIONAL LEARNING fulfills Luna’s mission to bring all children to dance as we deepen the knowledge and practice of dance learning through workshops, courses, panel conversations, and resources designed so that creative practitioners manifest creative self-efficacy, investigate teaching practice, establish collegial communities, cultivate dance leadership, and become change agents.

Luna helps the field of dance education arc toward justice through FIELD MOVING, our practice-to-policy approach that includes sharing the findings of our inquiries and research; joining with others to create impact; and relentlessly advocating for inclusion, creativity, and self-determination. Recognizing that our work is situated within systems of oppression and racial injustice, we seek change by working together in community, paying attention, staying true to our values, and placing children as the future at the center of our work.

Through PARTNERS FOR CHANGE, Luna collaborates with organizations (social service and human welfare agencies, schools and school districts) throughout the region, state and nation to build capacity for enduring dance programs that support the values of each community.

Luna, an expert in EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION in dance, has refined, over more than three decades, its pedagogy and curriculum to align with discoveries in neuroscience, play research, child psychology, and cultural responsiveness. As we envision a future with today’s toddlers becoming tomorrow’s leaders, early learning demands our crucial attention and focus. Luna faculty continue our research, theory-building, and practice to better understand how dance is at the convergence of all processes of learning.

Organization

Luna Dance and Creativity

Address

931 Ashby Avenue

Berkeley

94710

County

Alameda

Region

Bay Area – Other

Phone

(510) 883-1118

Congressional District

California's 12th congressional district

State Assembly District

District 14

State Senate District

District 7

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