Lead Artist & Artistic Director
Shefali Shah
Shefali Shah is a dance instructor, singer, songwriter, choreographer, and education consultant. She is the co-director of the Bay Area Bomba y Plena Workshop at La Peña Cultural Center, where she teaches weekly adult and youth Bomba dance classes. She is the founder and artistic director of performance ensemble Aguacero, the youth Ensemble Quenepas and is a principal dancer with La Mixta Criolla. Shefali regularly presents at schools, universities, festivals, and events throughout California. For over 25 years Shefali has dedicated herself to the study, practice, and education of Puerto Rican Bomba music and dance. She trained extensively and performed with members of the legendary Cepeda Family at “Maestros de Bomba en la Bahía,” an event that she co-founded and co-produced, featuring master drummers and dancers from Puerto Rico. She has performed at the SF Ethnic Festival Dance, and with Aguacero at the Annual Cuba Caribe Festival (2013, 2015, 2016) , at the 2016 BomPlenazo in NYC, and West Wave Dance Festival. She co-produced “Maestros de Plena y Bomba en la Bahia,” featuring Los Pleneros de la 21 and Alma Moyo. Shefali has performed with renowned artists such as Modesto Cepeda, Roman “Ito” Carrillo, Hector Lugo, and John Santos to name a few. In 2017 Shefali was Awarded the Alliance for California Traditional Arts Master Apprentice grant to mentor and teach apprentice Melody Gonzalez from Los Angeles California. Under her and Hector Lugo’s direction, the Quenepas Youth Ensemble opened for La Santa Cecilia at the Brava Theatre in San Francisco in 2011. In 2017, Quenepas’ Puerto Rico educational tour culminated in a performance at the world renown “Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian” where they opened for La Sonora Ponceña. Shefali, was one of four leaders of the 2019 9th annual “Encuentro de Tambores” in Cataño, Puerto Rico, dancing and singing with the Diaspora Delegation. In December 2023, Shefali was invited as a guest artist to sing and dance at Tamboricua's 25th anniversary in Puerto Rico at the Coca Cola Music Hall. She has taught at universities in Northern and Southern California, New York and Puerto Rico. Through her teaching, music, dance and education, Shefali supports community healing and creativity to give way to cultural work that resists socio-political barriers and oppression.
Guest Artists, Workshop Educators & Collaborators
Jade Power Sotomayor
Dr. Jade Power-Sotomayor is a Cali-Rican educator, scholar and performer who works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at UC San Diego. Moving from Puerto Rico to California as a young person, she came into full conciencia through her experiences in collaborative artistic projects that sought to bring attention to how elite powers target and feed on the most vulnerable in our society. Today, her research and writerly interests span across Puerto Rican cultural studies, Latinx/Latine theatre and performance, dance studies, nightlife cultures, epistemologies of the body, land-based performances, feminist of color critique, bilingualism, race and language, and intercultural performance in the Caribbean diaspora. Her writing and publications have been recognized with multiple awards across various professional organizations. Her first single-authored book ¡Habla! Speaking Bodies Dancing Our América is forthcoming from NYU Press. In addition to decades of experience on the stage, she is also a dramaturg and co-directs and performs with the San Diego-based group Bomba Liberté.
Ayla Davila
Ayla Davila is a Bay Area native of Guatemalan descent and an accomplished musician. A Berklee College of Music graduate, she is a seasoned bassist, composer, arranger, and instrumentalist, recognized as one of the most talented bass players in the Bay Area. As a founding member of notable bands like Los Cenzontles, La Mixta Criolla, and Carne Cruda, Ayla has made a significant impact on the local music scene. Her versatility and expertise have also led her to tour and collaborate with renowned Latin bands, including Mario y Su Timbeko, La Moderna Tradición, and Jesús Díaz y su Qba.
Yairamaren Maldonado
Yairamaren Maldonado completed a Ph.D. in Latin American and Caribbean Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a published writer with over 15 years of experience co-creating community-based storytelling with hundreds of folks, mostly women, in California, Latin America, and the Caribbean. She is also the founder and executive director of Escritura Pública, a non-profit dedicated to uplifting BIPOC women’s voices through storytelling, the literary arts, and wellness. Her second book Ciencia ficción en el mirador / Sci-fi at the Mirador was published by Ediciones del Flamboyán in 2022, her third book, Bioluminiscencia, will be published with La Criba editorial in 2025, and she regularly publishes on her Substack newsletter Escritura Imperfecta. She is also the author of multiple academic research articles and book chapters, and has served as the editor of several academic and creative writing volumes, including the recently published volume Historias para todas (2025), a compilation of the stories and poetry of more than 30 Puerto Rican women from all walks of life.
La Doña
La Doña is a solo artist, music educator, activist and cultural worker from San Francisco, CA. Born Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Govea, she began her career at age seven playing trumpet, strings and percussion in her family’s conjunto. She is a student, teacher and preservationist of Latinx traditional arts like corrido, bolero, cumbia, and mariachi. In her compositions, she combines these ancestral traditions with contemporary diasporic musics like reggaeton, hip-hop and jazz. La Doña’s live performances are grounded in ceremony and social mobilization; she and her audiences sing, dance, cry and chant together, for collective healing and political action. La Doña’s roles as a teaching artist within San Francisco and Oakland Unified School Districts via SFJazz and Community Music Center inspire and inform her work as a composer, arranger, and band-leader. As a young, queer Latina, La Doña is concerned with representing stories not often told in the mainstream music industry, and providing amplification and audience to other young artists of color. La Doña was chosen as one of YouTube’s Foundry Artists (2019) and she has performed at Lollapalooza and Outside Lands music festivals… Read more >
Maritxell Carrero
Maritxell Carrero is a multidisciplinary artist whose love for Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba fuels her work as a performer, producer, and cultural advocate. Based in Los Angeles, she teaches and performs Bomba as a cantaora and is the founder of Taller Kurubina. She has performed with groups such as Atabey & Cunyáand collaborating with Aguacero, Bomba Liberté, Peace Inside Out, Areyto Borincano, Ifé, Boricua y de Mayagüez, Qualia, and others across California and Puerto Rico. She co-founded Carrero Creatives and produced Calle de la Resistencia, a docu-drama-musical now streaming on Amazon Prime. Her acting credits include Seven, Esperanza, and Peter Sellars’ The Indian Queen, which won five Golden Mask Awards in 2015 and toured internationally at the English National Opera, Teatro Real in Madrid, and Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater. Maritxell has served as a cultural consultant for the Grammy® Awards, Apple, Pepsi, Verizon, and Amazon, and has been featured in national campaigns for AT&T, Toyota, Modelo, and Western Union. She currently serves as Company Manager for CONTRA-TIEMPO, continuing to blend culture and advocacy. You can listen to her original bomba fusion music on Spotify.
Mónika Aldarondo Lugo
Mónika Aldarondo Lugo is a San Francisco Bay Area-based Branding and Portrait Photographer. She creates bold visual storytelling to amplify impactful small businesses through her studio, Laancla Creative. Mónika trained in journalism and arts education. She worked with young people and adults as an arts educator for over a decade. She also founded a national community for Latina photographers, Our Latina Lens. You can see her work and connect with her at laancla.com.
Héctor Lugo
Héctor Lugo is a percussionist, singer, songwriter, and educator. Born in Puerto Rico, he grew up immersed in the creole musical culture of the Island. He has recorded with a wide range of artists and performed nationally and internationally with numerous Latin, jazz, and Afro-Caribbean music ensembles. He is the founder and director of Latin Roots band La Mixta Criolla. His compositions and arrangements are featured in the acclaimed compilation Salsa de La Bahía (vol. 2), in the documentary film Dolores about the life and work of Dolores Huertas, and in La Mixta Criolla’s album AfroTaino. One of the pioneers of the bombamovement in California, Héctor co-founded The Bay Area Bomba y Plena Workshop in 2000, and is a founding member of bomba ensembles Cacike y Kongo and Aguacero. He has collaborated in the design and implementation of music and arts integration programs with SFJAZZ, the San Francisco Symphony, Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, San Francisco Community Music Center, Oakland Youth Chorus, and several other arts organizations. Presently he is a teaching-artist with Sfjazz and Living Jazz. Héctor is also a youth baseball coach and a passionate cook specializing in, of course, comida criolla puertorriqueña!
Marina Romani
Web creator & collaborator — Dr. Marina Romani is a queer multimedia writer and artist, editor, translator, educator, and performer of Western classical music and Puerto Rican music. She holds a PhD in from UC Berkeley, and she is a lecturer in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley, teaching upper-division courses in sociology of culture and cross-cultural communications. She presented her original research at international conferences in Europe and in the US. She was the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the UC Berkeley Arts Research Center, the Berkeley Language Center, among others. As a singer, Marina has performed with Aguacero in concerts supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and the San Francisco Arts Commission, and at venues such as Brava Theater, Dance Mission Theater, Stanford University, CubaCaribe Festival, MACLA Cultural Center in San Jose, California Environmental Justice Alliance, La Peña Cultural Center.