Sharna Fabiano

Sharna Fabiano is a dancer, choreographer, teacher and community organizer whose work centers on Argentine tango as both a performance practice and a vehicle for reciprocal partnership. Over more than two decades, she has trained across physical theatre, contact improvisation, modern and postmodern dance, somatic conditioning, and Argentine tango, developing a distinctive approach that challenges conventional role assignment and invites continuous negotiation between partners.

From 2003 to 2006, Fabiano was a member of TangoMujer, the world's first all-woman tango company. Performing alongside Valeria Solomonoff in the company's "Leading Ladies of Tango" repertory, she helped demonstrate that stage and social tango roles need not be mapped onto gender. Between 2006 and 2011, she directed her own performing company and produced three evening-length works at Dance Place in Washington, D.C. Rather than simply presenting social tango under stage lights, her choreography used postmodern structures, physical theatre, text, images, soundscapes and silence to make visible the intimate negotiation of attention, choice and connection that social tango requires.

In 2008, Fabiano founded Tango Mercurio in Washington, established to develop a large, diverse local tango community and present tango as a form of creative expression and connection. By 2018, the organization operated 235 classes, hosted more than 2,500 student visits, graduated eight teachers from its foundational teacher-training program, hosted sixteen visiting guest teachers, and presented five monthly dance events. Tango Mercurio documented that between 1997 and 2017, Fabiano taught thousands of people, toured as a guest artist across North America and Europe, and traveled by invitation to Phnom Penh and Havana. She completed an MFA in Dance at UCLA in 2014, focusing on how to represent intimate partner connection on stage, and later taught in UCLA's Dance and Theater departments.

Fabiano's work increasingly articulated tango as a study of reciprocal leadership. Her 2021 book *Lead & Follow: The Dance of Inspired Teamwork* and accompanying podcast translate principles from improvised social tango—where both partners continuously sense, propose, interpret and adapt—into a framework for collaboration and organizational practice. In recent years, she has developed new community practice in Long Beach, California, offering donation-based tango classes, practicas and the Altar Milonga, a monthly community gathering. An audio-documentary series, *The Tango Waits for You*, follows the first year of that community. California State University, Long Beach recognizes her as an internationally recognized movement artist with more than twenty-five years of teaching experience.