Lliane Loots is the dance lecturer in the Drama and Performance Studies Programme on the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban) campus. She has a Master’s degree in Gender Studies and is presently pursuing her PhD on African contemporary dance performance.  She works, part-time, as the dance journalist for The Mercury – a local daily newspaper in KwaZulu-Natal, and is delighted to hold the founding position of Artistic Director for UKZNs Centre for Creative Arts’s annual JOMBA! Contemporary Dance Experience. Loots founded FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY as a professional dance company in 2003 when it grew out of a dance training programme that originally began in 1995 as part of the Drama and Performance Studies Programme. As the artistic director and resident choreographer for FLATFOOT DANCE COMPANY, she has won numerous national choreographic awards and commissions including the FNB VITA award for choreography and the KZN DanceLink award for choreography. She has taught dance technique and choreography to students in many dance programmes, dance education departments, and companies all over the globe – some of these include, Nigeria, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, India, Cameroon. Zimbabwe, Mali and most recently, the USA.  Loots’ belief in dance education as a tool for profound social change has seen FLATFOOT use dance and arts as a mechanism of dealing with Gender Based Violence, HIV and AIDS and for environmental education. FLATFOOT is globally considered a company spearheading new ways of thinking about dance and education within a Southern context.