I have been belly dancing for 18 years, and still to this day feel like it’s the best thing that ever happened to me in my life! I got into it by accident- I was on the dance floor at a club, and a girl asked if I was a belly dancer…I’d always been fascinated by it, and so then I decided to try it, but I had never done any sort of dance before. When I first walked into a belly dancing class, I would have laughed you out of the studio if you’d told me then that this would be my career! I never dreamed that almost 20 years later, I’d have DVD’s out and be teaching and performing all over the world!

I’ve been teaching for 11 years, and a lot of my students have turned pro, even though many of them didn’t have prior dance training. When I first started belly dancing, I hadn’t done any other kind of dance; I just enjoyed dancing! Sometimes I felt lost because I didn’t “get” what was going on in class…so when I decided to teach after years of performing, I wanted to stress to my students that basically, ANYBODY can do this, I am living proof… people tell me I have an ability to break everything down, and make them understand whether physically, verbally or through humor and lots of gentle encouragement.

I teach workshops globally, and hold group and private classes at Dance Garden in Los Angeles. Visit my website: www.princessfarhana.com or for my LA classes, go to: www.dancegardenla.com

My first performance was after 6 months of dancing…I was horrible, but thankfully, I don’t think there was any video documentation!! I’ve never been nervous about performing- even at the beginning- I’m a natural ham! At this point, I have performed all over the world: Egypt, France, Belgium, Portugal, Mexico, Canada, as well as all over the UK numerous times and all across the USA. As far as style goes, I was trained in the USA and Cairo in Egyptian style, but nowadays I’m also well-known as a fusion performer, and I appear at a lot of Tribal festivals, even though I looooves me my cabaret fringe and of course, rhinestones! From my extensive base training, I’m proficient in lots of folkloric dance from North Africa; my specialties are my crazy abdominal work, balancing swords, raqs shamadan… AND high-concept, theatrical fusion to non-traditional music.