The four founders

Precious "Preciosa" Myers-Brown has been dancing since she was three years old in her native New York City. She trained at S&J Center for Dance in tap, jazz, ballet, African dance, hip-hop and street dance, took part in Dance Theatre of Harlem programming and Macy's Tap-a-Thon, and later continued for years at Joy of Motion Dance Center in Washington, DC. As a young dancer she taught through New York City's Police Athletic League summer programs.

The rest of her working life has been spent building things. She is Founder and CEO of Vista Supports, CINO VISTA, House of CINO, and the WATI Institute. In 2006 she pioneered the first Remote Supports model for people with disabilities in the District of Columbia, and she led the creation of the District's first smart home designed for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She is the first woman of color to found a full-service enabling technology and remote supports company, the author of Tech Equity: Freedom Through Enabling Technology, and a featured subject of the BBC Storyworks documentary series The Human Component. An innovation strategist and speaker, she is known as The Voice of Enabling Technology™.

Her advocacy runs to people with disabilities, seniors aging in place, and women over 50 stepping into who they are becoming. She challenges and encourages women to have the Audacity to Unhinge Your Dreams, to take off the chains, expectations and old agreements that keep audacity hinged in place.

Tap remains her first love. She still keeps tap shoes in her car so she can dance at the drop of a dime. Steel Sugar is literal and metaphorical, the steel beneath a tap shoe and the strength that comes with it, the sugar for flavor, femininity and Brown Sugar. Her mother was an avid theater and Broadway fan, and growing up in New York the family went to shows two and three times a week, walking up to the box office and taking whatever seats were available. She grew up on Alvin Ailey. For her, dance is the backstage of the mind.

KV Simmons is an AFAA-certified group fitness instructor and movement educator with more than thirty years of teaching. Growing up she knew exactly who she wanted to be, Debbie Allen or a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. Neither one happened. Dance fitness became the passion instead.

It started in 1995, when she became a teaching assistant in the Physical Education department at Towson University. In those days it was thong leotards and slouch socks. Today it is all about the boots. She has been certified in and has taught many formats over the years, and she is at her best teaching some form of dance, which is what she was doing through the early and mid-2000s in gyms, churches, and anywhere else that would have her.

In her own words: think you can't do that line dance? Come dance with me.

Dr. Danielle Tyler is an educator, fitness coach and systems-change leader whose work connects education, justice, institutional leadership and movement. She is a long-serving educator in Prince George's County Public Schools, where she leads ELA instruction and has raised student benchmark scores from 65 to 80 percent. Her professional experience spans the Smithsonian Institution, the American Red Cross, and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, across institutional philanthropy, event management, strategic planning, fundraising, donor stewardship, community partnerships and multi-million dollar campaigns.

Her doctoral research examines mobilizing the Black Church for justice, and she is sought out for expert commentary on educational justice and Christian nationalism. Her framework is the Prophetic Blueprint, data discipline joined to prophetic vision, treating education as an art form of expression and a tool for countering systemic bias. She is an ambassador and archivist of cultural movement and a constituent relationship expert who leverages dance to create transformative spaces that embrace resistance, resilience and joy.

Inside Concrete Steppas™ that becomes something specific. She finds the opportunity, prepares the application, manages the submission calendar and the pipeline, and coordinates the collective for every engagement from the rehearsal room through load-in and close. She gets the room, and she gets everybody ready to walk into it.

M’Balia "Bella" Rucker is a dancer, choreographer, instructor and mentor with more than forty-five years of dance experience and twenty-five years of teaching. Professionally trained at Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, DC, she has trained across ballet, tap, jazz, African dance, contemporary, hip-hop, modern and liturgical dance, studying and performing with master teachers and choreographers including Lynn Welters, Carol Foster, Mike Malone, Adrian Bolton, Raquis Petree and Katherine Smith. She has performed with Jennifer Holliday, Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Debbie Allen, and has appeared internationally as a featured artist in the Bahamas and Japan.

In 1996 she rededicated her gifts to ministry and service through dance. She is Founder and Director of Redemption Ministry Dance, Artistic Director of Zion's Daughters Dance Ensemble, and Founder and Director of Spirit of Life Dance Company, later renamed Touch Contemporary Dance Ensemble. She created the dance curriculum for Youth Investment Ministry of Arts in Washington, DC, directed the dance ministry at Hunter Memorial AME, and spent three years as a partner, facilitator and instructor for the Theater Dance Arts component of the Bobby Jones Gospel Retreat. She teaches jazz and modern at all levels along with ballet and dance history, and she is a licensed Zumba and MixxedFit instructor who has served as a dance-fitness facilitator for the Fabbody Retreat since 2016 with programming across the Caribbean and Mexico.

Inside Concrete Steppas™ she owns how the collective looks, live and on screen. Stage formation and presentation, where everyone stands and how they line up, how the group is positioned in every image that leaves the room, and the daily work of keeping the collective visible and present with the people who claim it back. Her commitments run to dance education, ministry, mentorship, and empowering women and young women of all ages.