Special Guests

Sugar Sullivan started her career at the age of nine. She was a member of the Original Jazz Dancers, a distinguished group of Lindy Hoppers and Hoofers from Harlem’s heyday. Sugar has been featured with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band, Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho Orchestra, and Panama Francis and his Savoy Sultans, among others.

Sugar grew up in New York's Harlem and started to visit the famous Savoy Ballroom during a period in the late 1940s when swing as well as be-bop and Latin rhythms influenced dancers all over the U.S.. Her talent and ambition soon lead her in the direction of professional dancing and during the decade to come, she was featured in the Mura Dehn documentary Spirit Moves, won the Harvest Moon Ball in 1955 and became a member of touring dance company Sonny Allen and the Rockets. During the 1960s and 1970s, when vernacular American jazz dancing suffered a severe decline, the company was one of very few that still kept the Lindy Hop and Harlem dancing in general alive. In the early 1980s, Sugar teamed up with legendary Savoy Ballroom dancer Albert Minns and started to perform again. After Albert's passing in 1985 and the foundation of the New York Swing Dance Society, she gradually experienced an interest from the embryonal but slowly growing Lindy Hop community, and soon she found herself on and off involved with a new generation of Lindy Hoppers. Sugar is today one of very few dancers from the old-school generation still out and about passing on the Harlem dance traditions to proselytes all over the planet.

Denise Minns-Harris – Lifelong Grassroots Activist, Sister, Teacher, Wife, Mother, Grandmother, Dancer, Buddhist and professional Fundraiser for a wide variety of national and local political, educational, progressive non-profit and advocacy organizations.

Denise was born in NYC. Her father, a black man named Al Minns married her Jewish mother, Audrey Sands in 1949 when their marriage was illegal in most of the United States. They had 4 children. Denise grew up with her dad traveling across the US and the world as a was a renowned Jazz dancer. Whenever he would return home from touring, he would hypnotize her with stories of the countries he’d performed in and how people in countries like Brazil and Nigeria lived.

At 14, she became a youth member of the Black Panther party, and at 16 years old – a 10th grade HS student - she talked her way into being accepted at the State University of New York - College at Old Westbury – majoring in dance and education, where her revolutionary leaning became even more informed and polished.

Following college, she moved to Los Angeles with her Jazz shoes, married Will Harris and had 3 sons. Jason, an investment trader, Kevin, an international award-winning choreographer with a dance studio in Dallas, Tx., and Wayne, who danced in the Tony nominated Broadway show, “The Prom.” While raising her children, her passion and talent for fundraising emerged and when Kevin was a young teen, he joined the Debbie Allen Dance Academy and Debbie invited her to be one of the Directors. Wayne later joined DADA as well. Denise worked side by side with Debbie for 15 years raising the Academy to the level of international renown it now enjoys. But after 15 years, Denise returned to her equal love of fundraising for advocacy organizations.

Her parents’ example of courage taught her to never acquiesce to the status quo and be willing to fight for what you believe in…especially your dreams. This has been the touchstone of her life and one she has strived to pass on to the youth.