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Gigi Jensen
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Colombian-born, Patricia "Gigi" Restrepo de Jensen, who was born in Colombia, began a love affair with dance in college with her first ballroom dance class in 1981. The years have seen a potpourri of ballroom, swing, salsa, modern, and ballet.
She found Argentine tango in 1995 and has danced Argentine dances for more than two decades. Her affair bloomed into a full-time romance of tango and folkloric dance coupled with building a career as an arts administrator.
Besides tango, she has also studied ballet, modern, and ballroom dance. She has taught Argentine tango for many years, both with with Pampa Cortés and her husband, Warren (who has taught with Gigi, as well as studied with Cortés).
She has been a guest lecturer at several universities and taught and performed multiple times at workshops throughout the United States.
She won the 1998 Grand Prix Championship at the San Francisco International Grand Ball competition and in 2011 at the Seattle Tangoearth Immersion tango competition. She and Ken Brown reached the Semi-Finals in the 2014 Argentine Tango USA championships.
She taught with Pampa Cortés at Stockton Folk Dance Camp in 2012 and 2013. She and Cortés founded Tango a Media Luz (1998-2006) and she founded Tango and More Argentine Dance (2006 to date), teaching, performing, and producing stage shows. Gigi has directed three stage shows (2005, 2008, 2015), a major tango festival in Houston, Texas (2010), and the New World Tap Festival (2015), as well as numerous Latin American programs.
Gigi enjoys her role as an emcee and has appeared in programs at the California Academy of Sciences, Santa Clara University, BATango’s "Tango in the Square" and in "Asi se Baila el Tango," broadcast several times on a San Francisco television station. She has been interviewed on Univision’s KDTV Channel 14, and on United States, Argentine, and Mexican radio. Recently, Gigi performed in Buenos Aires, and taught in the north of Argentina. She continues to travel and study tango and folk dance in Argentina.
She has been a judge for Carnaval San Francisco, and worked on the Isadora Duncan Dance Awards Committee, and various arts granting panels. She has been a community liaison for San Francisco’s Grants for the Arts and continues to work with the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.
In addition to the two appearances on the Stockton teaching staff in 2012 and 2013 as Pampa Cortés’ teaching partner, she has attended the Stockton Folk Dance Camp as a camper for several years.