Praise Dance · Oakland & Berkeley
Amazed By Grace
Dance Ministry
A faith-based dance ministry founded and led by Nikka Maynard, Founder and Artistic Director.
A faith-based dance ministry founded and led by Nikka Maynard, Founder and Artistic Director.
The mission of Amazed By Grace is to use Praise Dance and spiritual art as vehicles for storytelling, healing, cultural preservation, faith, resilience, joy, and community connection. Our work honors the African diasporic roots of Praise Dance while creating contemporary spaces where youth, adults, families, dancers, faith communities, and audiences can explore their cultural and spiritual identities through movement, music, worship, and collective expression.
A New Praise Dance Project
The Next Movement in the Amazed by Grace Dance Ministry mission
A movement toward spiritual renewal, community healing, and collective wellness.
Something’s About to SHIFT! is a new praise dance project in development and the next chapter in the mission of Amazed by Grace Dance Ministry. Rooted in faith, cultural expression, and the transformative power of movement, this project explores the connection between spiritual wellness, emotional healing, physical expression, and community health.
Building upon the foundation of faith, resilience, joy, and belonging, this project uses praise dance as a tool for community engagement, wellness, and empowerment. Through movement, music, storytelling, and worship, participants are invited to release stress, reconnect with their bodies, strengthen relationships, and cultivate a deeper sense of purpose and belonging.
At a time when individuals and communities are navigating stress, grief, uncertainty, and social disconnection, Something’s About to SHIFT! creates space for collective healing and restoration. The project recognizes that health and wellness extend beyond the physical body to include emotional, mental, spiritual, and social well-being. By bringing together youth, adults, elders, dancers, musicians, churches, and community members, the project encourages intergenerational connection, creative expression, and shared experiences that nurture healthier, more connected communities.
Through praise dance workshops, community intensives, performances, and participatory wellness activities, Amazed by Grace seeks to make the arts an accessible pathway to self-expression, stress relief, cultural connection, and spiritual renewal. The project honors the rich traditions of African American praise dance and its connections to African diasporic movement, using these traditions to affirm identity, strengthen community bonds, and inspire hope.
At its heart, Something’s About to SHIFT! is about creating the conditions for positive change—within individuals, within families, and throughout the community. It invites participants to recognize their capacity for resilience, embrace restoration, and move together toward a healthier and more empowered future.
Our vision is to transform movement into a pathway for wellness, worship into a source of renewal, and community connection into a foundation for collective healing.
When we move together, we heal together. When we heal together, we create space for something new. Something’s about to SHIFT!
Amazed By Grace Dance Ministry is a faith-based dance ministry founded and led by Nikka Maynard, Founder and Artistic Director. With more than 30 years of experience in West African, African American, Caribbean, contemporary, and Praise Dance traditions, Nikka brings together cultural heritage, spiritual expression, choreography, teaching, and community engagement to create meaningful opportunities for people to experience faith and storytelling through movement.
Our work embodies storytelling as a counter-narrative of faith, resilience, joy, belonging, and collective empowerment. It pushes back against negative messaging surrounding unforeseen circumstances and instead celebrates what God has built, restored, and continues to cultivate within our communities. Through spiritual art and expression, we activate spaces that many people may never encounter through traditional arts programming.
Praise Dance is deeply rooted in the history of the African diaspora and is connected to traditions such as the Ring Shout, a sacred communal practice carried from West Africa through the Middle Passage and transformed within African American religious and cultural life. Our work honors this lineage while creating opportunities for contemporary generations to express faith, tell their stories, reclaim joy, and celebrate their cultural and spiritual inheritance.
Our theological tradition is rooted in the Christian faith and African American Baptist worship traditions, with Praise Dance serving as a form of worship, ministry, testimony, and spiritual expression. Our practice recognizes Praise Dance as part of a larger African diasporic lineage, including the Ring Shout and other communal movement traditions that evolved within African American religious life.
At the heart of Amazed By Grace is the belief that art can minister to the whole person—spiritually, emotionally, culturally, and communally. We create spaces where people can experience release, reflection, wellness, worship, and connection while celebrating what God has built, restored, and continues to cultivate within our communities. Our work is ultimately about more than dance; it is about creating spaces where people can find their voice, strengthen their sense of belonging, honor their heritage, deepen their faith, and recognize their capacity to contribute to the community around them.
Our community engagement extends beyond performance. Through our annual Praise Dance Extravaganza, community dance intensives, workshops, classes, and intergenerational activities, we create opportunities for people to participate directly in the artistic process. These gatherings bring dancers, musicians, families, youth, elders, churches, artists, and community members together around movement, worship, culture, and storytelling. The goal is not simply to present a finished performance, but to build relationships and create spaces where people can learn, contribute, connect, and experience the transformative power of collective expression.
Our dance intensives provide accessible opportunities for participants to develop movement skills while exploring the cultural and spiritual history behind Praise Dance. The annual Praise Dance Extravaganza provides a larger platform for dancers and community members to celebrate this work publicly, bringing together different generations and levels of experience. These activities create a cycle of participation—learn, create, minister, reflect, and reconnect—that strengthens community relationships beyond a single event.
Our work creates an outlet for emotional release, reflection, connection, and wellness—a space where the community can experience a reset through movement, music, worship, and collective expression. The impact reaches beyond the dancers themselves. Families experience shared cultural and spiritual expression; young people see themselves represented and empowered; audiences are invited into reflection and joy; and participants develop a deeper sense of belonging and connection to one another.
Ultimately, the impact of this work is about more than dance. It is about creating spaces where people can heal, gather, learn, celebrate, find their voice, and recognize their ability to contribute to the future of their community. Through Praise Dance, we transform cultural heritage and spiritual expression into opportunities for connection, wellness, empowerment, and community participation.
Nikka Maynard is a gifted performer, choreographer and teaching artist with over three decades of experience in West African Dance through her training and work with Diamano Coura West African Dance Company.
Raised in Berkeley, CA, by Trinidadian parents deeply entrenched in music, Nikka's dance journey began at a young age:
I entered Berkeley High School and at age 15 I took my first West African dance class with Mama Naomi Diouf. By the time I graduated from Berkeley High in 1993 I’d joined Diamano Coura as a company member and grew over the years within the company. In 2019, I became Co-Artistic Director with Mama Naomi. Through these years, I’ve taken what I’ve learned from my Caribbean and Hip-Hop roots, combined with Papa Zak and Mama Naomi's African roots, to develop my own artistic presence and voice.
For five decades, Diamano Coura remains one of the longest surviving African dance companies in the United States and through our arts programming, cultural exchanges, arts-in-education programming, and apprenticeships, we have directly touched the lives of thousands of youth, adults, and seniors.
My work as an artist and educator has always been shaped by the saying, “Each One Teach One.” This is an African proverb that originated in the United States when enslaved Africans were denied education. When someone learned how to read or write, it became their responsibility to teach someone else. The idea is to spread knowledge for the betterment of your community. Dance saved my life as a young woman and I have always seen it as my duty, my responsibility to impart my teaching and gift of dance to the next generation and generations to come. I am dedicated to the teaching of both the technique and practice of dance as a healing power that creates testimony for every human being.
Diamano Coura has helped me shape my work with hundreds of young women throughout the Bay Area, United States and internationally. As a choreographer I have been able to see how through performing arts we can make social commentary on issues such as the role of women within society, war and gun violence, rites of passage, spiritual values, and climate change. I have performed with people from various walks of life, cultural backgrounds, ages and in venues such as Ashkenaz in Berkeley and Malonga Center in Oakland to international venues such as the Daniel Sorano Theater in Senegal, West Africa.
Through my involvement in the praise dance ministry at my church, I found a deep connection between my faith and my artistry, blending my spiritual beliefs with my love for dance. With unwavering dedication and continued practice, I’ve mastered both West African Dance and liturgical dance, imparting my knowledge and passion to my students and to my choreography. My work aims to inspire others to embrace movement not only as a form of artistic expression but also as a means of spiritual connection. This is also an opportunity to share my love and dedication to West African culture within my church community.
Through the arts we also can teach and learn leadership, which centers empathy, risk-taking, ethics, accountability and remembering that we are all human beings dependent upon each other in order to create a sustainable world.
Amazed by Grace is my current dance–music collaboration with the legendary Diamano Coura West African Dance Company and the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir (OIGC), commissioned and produced by World Arts West. Together, we are exploring the historical and artistic intersections between West African and African American Praise traditions in music and dance.
Praise dance (or Liturgical Dance) emerged in Black Baptist churches in the late 19th century, as a descendant of the ring shout. Influenced by Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, Dance Theatre of Harlem, and infused with modern, jazz, hip-hop, Caribbean, mime, krump, and flag dance, Praise dance rose to prominence in the 1970s. More than performance, it is a physical expression of worship—an offering of devotion and storytelling through movement.
Hidden within Praise dance is the story of our journey from Africa to our present home in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Black culture, the arts and the church have always been intertwined, nurturing generations of artists, yet this aspect of our cultural history often remains overlooked.
Through this collaboration, we seek to illuminate the deep connections between West African traditions and African American Praise dance, restoring it to its rightful place in the African American story—an embodied history of resilience, faith, and joy.
