Rosangela Silvestre is a choreographer, instructor, dancer and creator of the Silvester Dance Technique, and is a native of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, where she graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Dance. Her post-graduate work specialized in choreography, and she earned her degree from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). She has researched dance and music in Brazil, India, Egypt, Senegal and Cuba as part of her ever-evolving and eclectic palette of movement. She acquired training in such diverse techniques as: Martha Graham, Limon, Horton, floor bar, classic ballet and Dunham Technique, and has experienced diverse dance expressions such as Germany theater dance, contemporary, folkloric, as well as traditional dances of Africa and other continents. Her instructors include Raimundo Bispo dos Santos (Mestre King), Mercedes Baptista, Clayde Morgan and Carlos Moraes, Nelma Seixas, among others, beginning in the late 1970s.
Since 1981, Silvestre started to travel in and around Brazil to teach, to train dancers, to perform, to lecture, and to demonstrate, to consul,t and to attend seminars and residencies in diverse universities and dance festivals such as : Colorado College Dance Festival; New Orleans Dance Festival; and dance camps such as the California Brazil Camp. She choreographed numerous dance pieces for companies based in Brazil—Balé Folclorico da Bahia and Odunde—as well as Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company, Ballet Hispanico Repertory Company, American Academy of Ballet, Roots of Brazil, Dance Brazil, Viver Brazil, Muntu Dance Theater and the Kendra Kimbrough Dance Company.