About Passion Meets Dance
MISSION: Spark Fun, Passion & Joy for you and your partners
Passion Meets Dance was founded by Nelly Sparkman to help everyone explore, express, compete, or simply just enjoy dance. PMD is open to everyone at all age levels, from children to young professionals and to “young at heart,”. Nelly specializes in understanding shy individuals, helping you gain more courage on the dance floor—at weddings, special events and social gatherings!
About Nelly
As an independent dance instructor, Nelly enjoys showing students how easy and fun it is to learn to dance and specializes in working with couples and shy individuals.
She began dancing when she was growing up in Russia. As a young girl, she would dance to hymns she found on her family boombox and would run, spin, and leap from room to room with her hands up towards heaven—imagining that she was dancing in the clouds with Jesus.
However, with Nelly’s religious upbringing, she was told it was not proper to dance and that dancing was a sin (this is not an uncommon belief among many religious affiliates).
Should Christians dance or even go to dances? This article addresses various viewpoints.
Her passion for God and dance led her to start her Hallelujah Dance Parties twice per month. These social dance parties bring in faith-centered people from all over the Twin Cities. We believe there is “a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4).
Her dancing career began at college in Colorado. She moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota (sister city to Novosibirsk, Russia) and danced at TC Swing events. She then began her professional instructing career following a social dance event at Dance Life Ballroom where she was hired afterwards on the spot.
Nelly has been teaching ballroom since 2014. During that time, she was awarded two first place titles and one third place achievement at the Snow Ball competition with one of her students.
