Silvia Alexiev / Owner
For the love of dance…
Hi there, my name is Silvia Alexiev and if you have some time, I’d like to tell you my story.
I was born on October 15, 1977 in Sofia, Bulgaria; a small country in Eastern Europe. While neither of my parents are dancers, I grew up very close to my grandmother who was a great singer and dancer. While my grandma danced Bulgarian folk dance, I was absolutely fascinated by Ballroom Dancing. I would be watching competitions on TV and dreamed of wearing one of those beautiful gowns or Latin dresses.
When I was 6, my mom signed me up for Bulgarian folk dancing, which wasn’t very popular for a young girl. I didn’t enjoy going to rehearsals and I couldn’t wait to be old enough to leave. After 4 years I quit folk dancing and I signed up for a ballroom class. I still remember how excited I was going to class. I wasn’t a natural for sure but I worked hard for years and switched 3 ballroom dance schools before I got to compete. My family couldn’t afford to buy one of the fancy dresses I wanted but at least I got to do what I really wanted to.
It took a while for my mom to approve of me going to practice late at night at a such young age. She would say that dancing won’t take me anywhere and that I needed to get “a real job” when I grow up.
I never stopped dancing and it was dancing that got me through some real tough times in life like my parent’s divorce, me running away from home and working to pay my bills at 17, applying for college, coming to the US when I was 21, heartbreaks and more.
From Ballroom To Salsa
I moved to the US on February 9, 1999 to work as an au pair in Washington, DC. Needless to say the first thing I did was to find where to go dancing. The first place I danced at socially was Glen Echo park. I made some really good friends there and they told me about Chevy Chase ballroom, which is where I took my first ballroom classes in the US.
One day in the summer of 2004, a good friend of mine took me salsa dancing. I went there thinking that I am already a dancer and I’ll pick it up fast. I quickly realized that wasn’t the case and the first thing I needed to do is loose my ballroom frame and shake those hips and shoulders.
I met one of my greatest friends salsa dancing, Beto, he was the one who really got me into salsa and who introduced me to my first salsa performance team back in 2004. At the time he was a performer with a DC salsa group called Latin Motion. I auditioned for the team and joined my first salsa performance team. The following almost 3 years were a blast. We trained almost every day, we traveled to perform. We danced at some of the largest salsa congresses in the World, like LA, New York, Puerto Rico, and more. I LOVED IT.
In the photos below you can see me performing with Latin Motion at the LA Salsa Congress.
A personal chapter
Remember how I told you that my mom always told me to get “a real job”? Well, while I never stopped dancing, I also got my BA in web and graphics design from University of MD and my MA in film & video from American University. I worked for the Library of Congress, USAID, and finally NASA TV, practicing my other passion for digital art and media. I’ll tell you more about my job as a producer at NASA TV further down.
In 2007 I met my husband on a ski trip to Vail, CO and soon it was time to move on in personal aspect. I moved to Chicago to make a change and take a leap of faith by starting my life with him. We now have two beautiful daughters and he’s been my absolute biggest support throughout my journey as a dancer and business owner. We love skiing, kiteboarding, and most of all traveling and spending time as a family.
How Salsa With Silvia was born
You can probably guess that the first thing I did in Chicago was to find where to go salsa dancing. So, I did. I had so much fun meeting new people and dancing. Chicago has one of the largest and greatest salsa scenes I’ve ever seen. WHAT I LOVE ABOUT SALSA DANCING IS THAT IT’S LIKE A COMMON LANGUAGE THAT MILLIONS OF PEOPLE SPEAK. YOU GET ON THE DANCE FLOOR AND YOU JUST LOOSE YOURSELF TO DANCE. NO MATTER WHERE YOU OR YOUR PARTNER ARE FROM YOU SPEAK SALSA AND THAT’S ALL THAT MATTERS.
I got to travel and dance salsa in Bulgaria, Germany, and China, as well as many cities in the US.
The name Salsa With Silvia was born while I lived in Chicago. It’s also where I first started teaching salsa.
Since I was working from home in Chicago, I had more time on my hands and I also was looking for things to do outside of the apartment so I went to a local gym and offered to teach a salsa class.
I taught my first salsa class at a gym nearby where we lived. The lady who created the class schedule for the gym came up with the name Salsa With Silvia and put it on a flyer. At first I thought it was a cheesy name but I noticed that people remembered it easily so I stuck with it and here we are today…
Shortly after, I started teaching at the Dance Academy of Salsa where the owner Miguel gave me a great kick start as an instructor and business owner.
I started my first salsa performance team, Amika Dance Company. The students on my performance team started with me from zero, I trained them and we started performing at local venues in Chicago. We even threw a show at my own wedding, which was really cool and the guests enjoyed it a lot.
While in Chicago, I also initiated my Trick of The Week Salsa Instructional video channel on YouTube. Much to my surprise the channel gained +10K thousands of subscribers. I get tons of comments from fans that are learning how to dance from my videos.
In the photos below you can see me teaching and performing with my student team in Chicago.
From NASA to Full Time Salsa
In 2009 I decided I’ve had enough of Chicago’s freezing cold, so I dragged my husband back to Washington, DC, which is where I still had my full time job as a lead TV Producer at NASA TV. I had my full time job up until September of 2014, when I decided it’s time to pursue my dream of opening a big state-of-the-art Latin Dance Studio in DC.
By the time I got back to DC I had grown fond of teaching people how to dance salsa so I looked for dance studios where I could teach. The beginning was rough. I had only two students in my first class at the DC Dance Collective studio on Wisconsin Ave. These two students were sent by a friend. Slowly but surely by word of mouth and because I was working hard on my online presence, my classes grew more and more.
In the photos below and the video above you can see me during my 10+ career as a lead TV producer at NASA TV. I met some of the most amazing and smartest people I know, including the late astronaut Piers Sellers (middle photo) and friends that will always be in my life.
While still working full time, I taught at DCDC and BTI for a few years and established a pretty solid network of students and supporters. A group of my very regular and talented students started talking me into forming a performance group. After much thinking I decided to give it a shot and start the DC version of Amika Dance Company (the company I originally started in Chicago). Some of these students later became instructors at my studio.
In the photos below you can see me with my DC Amika Dance Company with my first born daughter, plus I am pregnant with my second one in this photo. The second photo is me teaching some of my first DC classes at DC Dance Collective. Those classes got so popular, that at this point I had to start training a few students to become teachers so we could expand.
MOVING INTO MY BASEMENT STUDIO AND SAYING GOOD BYE TO NASA
In 2011 we bought our first house on Kenyon St in DC and of course we turned the basement into my first official dance studio. The classes got packed so quickly (see third photo below), that withing 4 years, it was time to think about our first commercial space.
In 2014 I made a final decision to quit my full time job and dedicate my time fully to running my salsa business.
The rest is history as they say. Click the button below to see how we built each studios from scratch and became the Largest Latin Dance studio in the DMV.
Thank you for reading my story and thank you for being a part of the Salsa With Silvia dance community!
Not the final chapter
I have always believed that evolving and adding new chapters to your life is the secrete to staying motivated and most of all to leaving something meaningful behind you. Every couple of years or so I find myself needing to learn something new, to face another challenge, and add another motivation to my daily routine.
That’s how I decided to go back to my passion for photography and videography. Even though I worked as a TV producer, my job was to create the idea, write the script and then tell my crew what to shoot. I then went to the editing room and finished the product. However, I was never the one with the camera in my hands. So, I started learning basically from scratch how to shoot photos and videos entirely with manual settings and I practiced in my studios during parties and classes. Within a year I was shooting professionally and earning an income with it. I love the thrill of going to new places and telling a story with my camera.
Remember ballroom dance? My first love for dance. My childhood dream ever since I was a little kid was to compete in Ballroom dance. While I love Salsa dancing and teaching and I always will, somewhere deep down I wanted to go back to that dream and see where it takes me. With more than a 25 year break, I returned to Ballroom training and competing with the help of the amazing team of Tyson’s Ballroom in VA. The greatest feeling of all is to see how proud my kids are of me taking that challenge and seeing me dance. Starting to train hard at the age of 47 is no joke on your body but their smiles and how alive it makes me feel is all worth it.
Like I said, not the final chapter. Hopefully you’ll come back to continue reading my story. Either way thank you for visiting and I hope you have joined or will join our dance classes so you can experience the thrill of dancing and see how dancing can help you be happy, make friends, stay in shape, and go through tough times in life, just like it did for me.
Until the next chapter…
Yours truly,
Silva Alexiev (Proud owner of the Salsa With Silvia dance studios)
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