SoCal Ballet Scene

MANAGEMENT

CEO/Executive Director

Rena Kamariotakis

CEO/Executive Director Experience

Rena Kamariotakis has worked as a software engineer for over 15 years and is currently a product manager at Zillow. In addition, she has been a lifelong ballet dancer in the Orange County area. She danced professionally with the Anaheim Ballet, performing the Arabian Queen in their Nutcracker tour in Nevada and Southern California and dancing soloist roles in Hans Christian Anderson, Martini, Carnival of the Animals, and Balanchine's Serenade. Over the last decade she has been teaching ballet at schools throughout Southern California, including Jimmie Defore Dance Center, Anaheim Ballet School, Maple Conservatory, Dmitri Kulev Classical Ballet, V & T Dance, and Laguna Dance Theatre. She has focused her teaching primarily on adult ballet, offering open classes to the community in a wide variety of levels from beginner to advanced. She loves passing down her knowledge and passion for ballet to her students, placing emphasis on artistry. During the covid pandemic, Rena began offering her classes complimentary to local professional dancers so that they could maintain their physical training during the difficult period of not having performance work. Through the SoCal Ballet Scene, she is able to continue offering this service to professional dancers. Over decades of building connections with the ballet community in Southern California, Rena saw firsthand the abundance of great ballet talent that resides in this area. She also saw that there was a void of opportunity for the local professional dancers to perform and connect with the arts-loving community around them. This led her to found the SoCal Ballet Scene. In 2019, she started the organization on social media to help spread awareness about the various ballet companies in SoCal, with the goal of eventually creating a ballet festival to feature local artists and foster community. The plans for the festival got postponed with the onset of the pandemic, so Rena began producing short dance films as a means to provide an opportunity for local choreographers and dancers. Rena's vision for the ballet festival was realized in September 2022. She directed and produced the festival performance at the Robert B Moore Theatre in Costa Mesa, featuring 34 professional dancers from across Southern California in a mixed repertoire program, showcasing a wide variety of styles from classical to contemporary ballet. The festival united many local ballet organizations in a single celebration of the artform, with over 550 people from the community who attended and were able to see and connect with the local ballet artists. Since then, the SoCal Ballet Scene has rapidly expanded, with an annual festival drawing over 1,000 people and serving over 50 professional artists each year.

Staff Information

Staff Demographics

Ethnicity

Gender