Ryan Mead

Ryan is co-director and co-founder of Rueda con Ritmo. Ryan has been teaching Cuban Salsa and Rueda de Casino since 2005, and he has taught and performed across the United States, and internationally in Cuba, Mexico, Canada, and New Zealand. Besides being a dancer, Ryan has been a percussionist since he was eight years old. He is an alumnus of the New England Conservatory and Stanford and has taken many trips to Cuba to study both dance and music -- he now leads Cuba Dance Study Trips with Sidney three times per year, where he recently performed with Companía All Stars in a music video with the Grammy-winning Septeto Santiaguero. As both dancer and musician, Ryan is uniquely positioned to illuminate the inextricable connection between dance and music. Aside from his creativity as a choreographer, he is perhaps best known by lovers of Cuban dance and music for innovating a vocabulary of rhythmic calls and steps to aid dancers in the understanding and interpretation of Cuban music.