Faalon Andrews
Faalon is an Account Executive at BetterCloud, a cloud-based tech company in Austin. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2019 with a degree in Communications and Creative Writing. She began her career in tech sales in Austin immediately upon graduation and has now laid her roots in East Austin living with her partner and two cats.
Faalon prides herself in her worldly experiences and perspectives, having grown up in a military family. She's lived on three separate continents throughout her childhood which helped shape her into a person with a passion for storytelling, culture, and human communication. This drew her to volunteer for and attend various Blue Lapis Light shows.
Aside from her professional career, Faalon has a passion for music. She was a radio DJ and Producer for four years on WNUR 89.3FM in Chicago, IL. Today, you can find her DJing at her "Yoga and Live Music" classes she hosts with her partner around Austin.
Namrata Dubey
With a career in Human Resources as her full-time commitment, Namrata brings a rich tapestry of passions and experiences that make her an invaluable asset to our team. She embarked on a transformative journey with Blue Lapis Light in 2016 and calls Blue Lapis Light her happy place - a sanctuary of joy, creativity, and self-expression.
Her global perspective, cultivated through a varied education background, her love for languages, extensive travel, and residency in three diverse international communities, uniquely positions her to understand the intricacies of cross-cultural dynamics. This insight is in line with the vision of Blue Lapis Light - creating a space where artists from all walks of life feel welcomed and celebrated.
Beyond the physical expression, Namrata also weaves narratives through occasional writing, mostly poems for self. As a former proprietor of a photography business, she has a keen eye for telling stories through visuals. For Namrata, creativity is not just a pursuit; it's a way of life - a continuous dance between the tangible and the intangible. In her leisure, she enjoys spending time with her son, playing pool, and learning about healthy living, food, and wine.
Paul Harford
Paul was born in a small village in the Allegheny mountains of Pennsylvania, he lived in Mexico for 15 years.
He came to Austin in 1972 to attend St. Stephen’s Episcopal School and The University of Texas. A Liberal Arts graduate in the Plan II Honors program, he came back to stay after his medical training in Houston and San Antonio. Here, he has trained medical students and residents in his field of Critical Care Medicine and is now affiliated with the Dell Medical School at UT Austin.
Since 1988 he has been involved in the evolution of Jump-Start Performance Company, a San Antonio company dedicated to support new artists and original work.
In this vein, supporting Sally and her team has been important to Paul ever since her early work here in Austin. He believes Blue Lapis Light provides a remedy for our souls. Because the company also educates the youth of our community, it provides hope for our future.
Sally Jacques
Sally Jacques, founder of Blue Lapis Light, creates site-specific aerial dance works that transform urban spaces by engaging architecture with movement, music and nature.
A native of England with multicultural heritage, Jacques spent her early career studying dance in London at The Place, The Contemporary Dance Center, and the Oval Theatre. She also attended the Lee Strasberg Drama School in New York where she studied improvisation and acting. As a young performer, Jacques hitchhiked throughout Europe with little money, sleeping on beaches, broken down ruins, and even a heated phone booth in the Swiss Alps. Her travels connected her with dedicated social justice activists from around the globe. Inspired by their work, Jacques attended United Nations Conferences, World Social Forums, and peace talks across Europe, Asia, South America, and North America. She worked with The Foundation for a Compassionate Society, the Everardo Foundation, the American Committee to Save Bosnia and with refugee camps in the former-Yugoslavia.
Merging her passions for performance art and social justice, Jacques created siteworks that addressed homelessness (64 Beds, 1989), AIDS (Body Count, 1991), the Gulf War (Inside the Heart, 1991), and environmental protection (Inside the Springs, 1991). As Jacques’ work evolved, her choreography reached new heights. She began by hanging ropes above an empty swimming pool and progressed to rigging aerialists from bridges, power plant stacks and high-rise buildings. The ephemeral sight of dancers carving their bodies across the night sky highlights the beauty and grace that can exist even among the chaos and tragedy of our world.
The recipient of numerous honors, Jacques has been named: Austin Arts Hall of Fame Inductee; Samsung Signature Awardee; Greater Austin YWCA Woman of the Year for Achievement in the Arts; Honorary Lifetime Member of the Golden Key National Honor Society; and recipient of The Susan B. Anthony Award for Peace. She has also received several Austin Critics Table Awards including Best Dance Concert and Best Choreographer. Jacques has been bestowed multiple grants including: Art Matters, NYC; the New Form Regional Initiative Grant with José Luis Bustamante funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation and Andy Warhol Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; Texas Commission on the Arts; and the City of Austin Cultural Arts Division. In addition to being featured on many radio and television programs, Jacques’ work has been studied and published in several magazines and books.
To make dance accessible for all and to foster a sense of community, Jacques taught movement to at-risk teenagers, prison inmates, and senior citizens for many years. Currently, Blue Lapis Light mentors at-risk youth through the Youth Taking Flight program.
PETER MILLS
Peter is a trial attorney who has family roots in Austin and the central Texas area going back several generations. He graduated from University of Texas Law School in December 2003 and has been licensed in Texas since May 2004. After law school he worked as an assistant district attorney in Caldwell County, Texas and in the Texas Department of Insurance, where he pursed enforcement hearings involving insurance fraud and state licensing cases that violated the Texas Insurance Code. He has since then represented clients in a variety of family, civil, and criminal cases. He has focused solely on personal injury cases since October 2013. Peter currently serves as a board member of renowned Austin-based aerial dance troupe, Blue Lapis Light, and is a member of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, Austin bar Association, and the Capital Area Trial Lawyers Association. He lives with and loves two rambunctious and somewhat badly-behaved dogs that he adopted from the Austin Animal Center.
Sarah Racanelli
TREASURER
Maxwell Locke & Ritter is one of the largest certified public accounting firms in Austin and has been serving the greater Austin area for over 25 years. The firm has a unique culture and focuses on three things: our clients, our people, and the community. Sarah specializes in high net worth individual and estate planning and a strong foundation in partnership, trust, and gift tax compliance. She is on the Estate Planning Council of Central Texas and a member of the AICPA and TSBPA.
Sarah is an Austin native and a graduate of St. Mary’s University with a Bachelor of Business Administration and Texas State University with a Masters of Accountancy. She also volunteers with the Center for Child Protection.
Tracey Ramsey Abbott
PRESIDENT
Tracey Ramsey Abbott is an Infection Control and Quality Improvement Registered Nurse as well as an Operating Room Circulating and Scrub Nurse at Austin Access Care surgery center in Austin, TX. Tracey is responsible for the development, training, maintenance, surveillance, and prevention of infections and risks based on ongoing analysis. This includes instituting and managing appropriate surveillance to ensure compliance with current nationally recognized safety and infection control standards. As a perioperative nurse, Tracey also works directly with the surgeons during the surgical procedure.
Tracey is an Army veteran of ten years who earned an Associate Degree in Nursing while in the Army and now has over twenty-five years of nursing experience in all areas of critical and emergency care. Tracey graduated in 2019 with a Master’s Degree in Public Affairs from the LBJ Executive Master of Public Leadership program at the University of Texas at Austin and is presently enrolled in the University of Texas School of Nursing, Doctor of Nursing Practice.
Tracey volunteers with the Texas Nurses Association District 5 on the Board as Director of Government Affairs. Tracey authored and presented two resolutions to the Texas Nurses Association 2020 House of Delegates in which both resolutions were presented, voted on, and passed.
Tracey has been attending classes with Blue Lapis Light since late 2012, fell in love, and has never looked back. Aerial silks and Blue Lapis Light have been an integral part of her life since. Tracey is proud to serve an organization that so clearly displays their ethics, transparency, and social stewardship.
Tracey and her husband, Tim, are active and enjoy traveling together. In addition, Tim is a singer/songwriter. They have four grown children with whom they are enormously proud and share their house with three cats, three dogs, and ten chickens.
Lavert Rogers
Coming soon.
John Rosato
John Rosato has been a general partner in over 30 real estate partnerships responsible for the management of all activities of the partnerships including acquisition, development, financing and investor relations. He was a general partner and planning consultant for the 230,000-square-foot Penn Field, named the Best Mixed-Use Development of 2004 by the Austin Business Journal. He manages real estate acquisitions and leasing for Austin Travis County MHMR, a public agency with more than 60 commercial and residential buildings. Mr. Rosato coordinated project management for a $9 million joint public works project for the City of Austin and Travis County, and has provided relocation consulting for those displaced by construction of State Highway 130. He was the Managing Partner for Seaholm, a $150M mixed use development in downtown Austin.
Mr. Rosato earned a Master of Science in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas School of Architecture. A licensed real estate broker, he has furthered his education with courses in the psychology of marketing, real estate contracts and appraisal. He served as President of the Heritage Society of Austin and was the Chair of the Downtown Austin Alliance board of directors.
Evalyn Stroud
Evalyn Stroud has organized events to provide opportunities for Austin communities to impact world hunger, primary education, and the environment. She serves local nonprofit organizations advancing the arts, education, and human rights. Evalyn supports international nonprofits impacting health and hunger.
As an Environmental Engineer and Electrical Engineer she gained experience assessing technical problems with broad scopes of impact, engineered solutions with great teams, and implemented solutions successfully. She drafted national emissions standards for the Environmental Protection Agency to implement the Clean Air Act. Evalyn moved to the Austin area to work in the technology industry and developed tools for the CPU and aviation industries. She currently manages residential remodels and land development projects to increase usability of land with minimal impact on the environment.
Growing up in several countries, Evalyn was able to appreciate the arts of many different cultures throughout the southwest US, Europe, and South America. When not busy with a property project, she enjoys dance, hiking, and rock climbing with family and friends.
TED YOUNG
VICE PRESIDENT
Ted is an architect practicing mostly in Austin, Texas, for many years working with Paul Lamb Architects. He feels lucky to be doing what he loves, collaborating with great clients, talented designers and skilled builders to make unique and artful homes. He was happy to help BLL design their studio building and always takes joy seeing dancers hang in the tall light filled space. In the past he has worked independently, with Mell Lawrence Architects and with a variety of firms in NYC during his early professional years. He’s always curious to see how Blue Lapis Light will create dance in dialog with a building or structure.
Ted was born in New Jersey, in 1964, and lived there until graduating high school. His parents are both artistic and civically involved. His dad was a theater arts teacher and a founder of the theater department at Fordham University, a Kentucky boy who made it through the navy, Columbia University and Stanford. His mom trained in the theater, received a degree from Cal Berkeley, went on to study dance at Julliard and later served on the board of education in two different New Jersey towns. They instilled a deep passion and respect for the arts in him.
Ted gravitated to architecture once in college, getting a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech in 1988, then coming to UT for a Master’s degree in 1996, after his years living in New York City. He believes that architecture is art, practical, but rooted in poetry. Ted believes deeply that all the arts should be treated with the same respect and given the same value as science, math, letters, and history. They are as essential to human life as cities, agriculture, medicine, and defense. How could we get through a pandemic without art?
For fun Ted likes to dance, but in a very disorganized way, kind of like the way he thinks. He likes to read, ride his bike, watch movies. He vaguely remembers liking to travel and explore different places and looks forward to doing it again.
Diana Zuniga
Diana G. Zuniga is an Austin based developer, investor , and real estate broker. She was a development partner of the Spring Condominium, a 42-story residential point tower valued at over $120,000,000 located at the west end of the CBD in Austin, Texas. In that capacity, she was responsible for sourcing project financing, construction oversight, and marketing and sales of the project’s 252 units to sell out. She is the President and Owner of Investors Alliance, Inc., a commercial real estate firm she founded in 1996, which specializes in investment property sales and acquisitions.
As an investor, Ms. Zuniga is the managing partner of several real estate investment partnerships, which own and operate various real estate assets including multi-family and office properties in the Austin and San Antonio, Texas area. She has 30 years of experience as an investor, managing partner and real estate broker.
Ms. Zuniga is a CCIM (Certified Commercial Investment Member of the Commercial-Investment Real Estate Institute) and a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Education. She is past President, Board and Executive Committee Member of the Real Estate Council of Austin, Board Member of the Central Texas Commercial Association of Realtors, associate member of the Austin Area Research Organization, and past President of the Austin Commercial Real Estate Society, as well as a member of the board of the Wilbarger Creek Municipal Utility District #1, and a member of the Advisory Board of IBC Bank, Austin. She is also a member of the Emeritus Board of Zachary Scott Theatre and a board member of Blue Lapis Light, an aerial performance troupe.
Ms. Zuniga has received numerous awards recognizing her abilities. Most recently, Diana was named one of the top commercial real estate practitioners in the country by the National Association of Realtors. She was named Top Woman in Austin Commercial Real Estate for the decade 2002-2012 by CREW Austin, the local chapter of Commercial Real Estate Women. Other recognitions include CoStar’s Top Ten Power Broker for 2003 through 2007, Top Ten Commercial Broker for 2004 and 2005, and Texas Monthly’s 2005 Super Agent Award. She was a finalist for 2004 and 2013 Profiles in Power awarded by the Austin Business Journal.
During her free time, she enjoys traveling with her husband, boating and all forms of cultural entertainment.