Darlina Marie is a Fire and Fusion dance who has been studying performance arts since age 13.  Before majoring in Theater Arts in college, Darlina took several years of jazz and ballet as a child and was a cheerleader for four years in her teens. She started performing on Spoken Word Slam teams in Dallas, Texas, in 2002. She was also part of El Paso’s original Free Hole Slam team in 2003, a founding member of the Depth Perception Poets with Gabriel Nunez of L.A.’s Team Tempest, and a featured poet in El Paso’s Poetry Project 2013. However,  Darlina didn’t really find her true calling in the performing arts industry until she found Tribal Belly Dance in 2004.

 

She has learned belly dance under the instruction of Natalia Anaya, Miriam Amaya, Claudia Rupely, Shana Oh, and Kareesha Willow and has taken workshops with such greats including Rachel Brice, Zoe Jakes, Mardi Love, Mira Betz, Moria Chappell, and many others. Darlina has performed at countless shows and events throughout the  regionincluding opening up for some of the Belly Dance Super Stars in Club Belly Dance El Paso 2011. She was also one of the founding members of the Bella Fusion Dance Company and has developed a unique vocabulary of her own Improvisational Tribal Style (I.T.S.) movements. She is also the founder, instructor and director of M.O.D. Tribal Fusion Dance. Most recently, she participated and received certification at the Tribal Massive, a world renown dance conference, held in Las Vegas in spring 2020. She is the first and only dance instructor from El Paso to receive this certification to date. 

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She has been teaching at Sol Studio since 2015 and we are proud she has made our space her second home.