Jamaica Itule Simmons is a creative and strategic thinker, an arts advocate, administrator, producer, designer, and curator. She is also a visual artist, dancer, mother, and traveler who was born in Tucson, Arizona and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She received her B.A. in Art and Hispanic Studies from Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon and an M.F.A. in Graphic Design at The Academy of Art University in San Francisco. The topic of her thesis was Dance as the Survival of Identity Within the Context of Cuban Culture, culminating in the production of a film, a hand produced book, photography exhibition and co-founding a non-profit organization.

She has been the Executive Director of CubaCaribe for the past 23 years. With her extensive leadership, development, and operational experience she has created numerous artistic opportunities for Cuban and Caribbean artists, expanded programming in collaboration with community partners, increased fundraising capacity, developed the board, co-created strategic plans, built an individual donor program and produced over 65 events including 20 annual festivals of dance and music and on-going children’s music and dance classes, San Francisco Carnaval contingents and more.

As she built the non-profit she also studied and performed Cuban dance forms and has attended hundreds of rehearsals, performed in multiple venues and co-created two dance companies.

Along side this, she worked as an early childhood educator- teaching pre-school for 16 years at Monteverde School, a Reggio Emilia school in Berkeley. She was a lead, Spanish language and Art teacher.

In her visual art and design practice she takes photographs, creates mixed media collages, paints, curates images for interiors, decorates her house and designs promotional and print products.

“I believe art is a chronicle of life’s flow. As a child I learned that art of all kind is to be appreciated, celebrated, talked about and worth understanding. I have had the desire to create and help others create for as long as I can remember, maybe it is because I was surrounded by artists close to me showing a part of themselves, my pride of being connected to people talented and brave and my hope to be able to do the same someday.”