Minerva Tapia is a Mexican-American choreographer, educator and company director of the Minerva Tapia Dance Group. Tapia holds a Ph.D. in Critical Dance Studies from the University of California, Riverside. Tapia received a Master of Fine Arts in Dance at the University of California, Irvine in 2006, and in 1986, she received her B.A. at the Escuela de Danza Gloria Campobello in Tijuana, Mexico. Her work has been presented in spaces like the Joyce SoHo in New York and in dance festivals in Panama, Costa Rica, Argentina, Spain, Brazil, Turkey and Cuba where she also performed and studied for seven years. Her research interest focuses on border dance culture, specifically the production of contemporary dance at the U.S.-Mexico border.Her essays have appeared in Revista Interdanza (INBA), Migración y Cultura (UNESCO-COLEF) and in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies. Tapia is Associate Faculty in the Department of Dance at MiraCosta College. She is currently the director of the Municipal Institute of Art and Culture (IMAC) in Tijuana.