About Carmela

Carmela Hermann Dietrich has been contributing to the health and well-being of Los Angeles through her work as a choreographer, dancer, educator and bodyworker for over 25 years. Her work is informed by personal history, politics, and the things people don’t discuss in public. She creates dances for the stage, film and site specific venues for dancers and people who don’t identify as dancers. 

Her choreography has been  presented throughout the United States and Europe at The Getty Center, The Bootleg Theater, REDCAT, Highways Performance Space, Electric Lodge,  Los Angeles Central Library, The New Arts Program in PA, the Seattle Festival of Dance and Improvisation (SFADI), the Bootleg Dance Festival,  Home LA,  Dance Moving Forward Festival and Saint Mark’s Church in New York. Her dance films have been presented in Dance Camera West and Dances Made to Order. She has collaborated with Simone Forti from 1998-present, performing improvisational duets about the cities where they performed including “Seattle”, “Los Angeles”, “New York'  and “Belgium”. She also creates dance-theater duet works with longtime collaborator Terrence Luke Johnson which comedically take on issues of sex, death, agism and intimacy including “Turning my Head to the Left” and “Homestretch”.

Dietrich is the author of  “Learning to Speak”, an article about text based-dance improvisation which was published in Taken By Surprise: A Dance Improvisation Reader (Weslyan University Press, 2003) along with articles by  Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, and Simone Forti. Dietrich has performed in several significant performances; Simone Forti’s 1960’s work “See Saw” at MoMA, and in Victoria Marks’ “Father Daughter Dances” with her father, Peter Hermann. She is one of 5 certified instructors to teach Simone Forti’s 1960’s Dance Constructions and taught the Dance Constructions to performers in the MoMA event, “Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done” in 2018.

She has taught choreography and dance improvisation at UCLA, California State University Long Beach (CSULB), Lawrence University, Santa Monica College, Highways, Pieter, The Electric Lodge. Santa Barbara Dance, and IDfest (Improv Dance Festival). She is the founder of The Making Dances Workshop, a choreography workshop for choreographers to receive constructive feedback while developing new work. Dietrich received her M.F.A. in Choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures in 1999. Carmela is an Upledger certified CranioSacral Therapist with a private practice in Mount Washington. She is currently completing the Somatic Experiencing (SE) trauma renegotiation training.