Dance Mambo is Sydney's only academy dedicated exclusively to mambo and salsa on2. We don't teach a little bit of everything. We teach one style, at the highest level we are capable of delivering, to dancers who are serious about getting better.
A story from Federico, co-director of DM: "I started dancing in my twenties after moving to Australia from Italy. No dance background, no particular talent, just a stubborn belief that if I kept showing up, I could get good.
In 2014 I took a class with Adolfo Indacochea in Milan, one of the most respected names in the mambo tradition. I was new to the style and made a beginner's mistake, turning my palm up instead of down after a leader's right turn, three times in a row, missing the connection each time. He stopped the class and corrected me in a way that was technically right but personally humiliating. The correction stayed with me. So did the feeling.
I did not stop. I showed up every week from that point, dancing, learning, and eventually teaching, without skipping a beat from 2014 until today.
Twelve years later, we attend Adolfo's training all over the world every year and have been acknowledged by him personally in multiple occasion. Last year we were invited to perform at his festival in NYC, and just being able to share a space next to some the world's leading experts and biggest names in the industry, is proof that our direction and goal was right all along, it simply needed time to manifest itself"
That is the philosophy underneath everything we do at Dance Mambo. Small improvements over time, consistent effort, and the patience to build something properly rather than quickly. We are not interested in teaching you more. We are interested in teaching you better.
Federico is a co-director, principal teacher, and the strategic mind behind Dance Mambo as a business. Outside of the studio he works full time as Director of IT for the Asia Pacific region at Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, and runs a separate creative business in photography and videography for dancers and Latin events across Australia.
His background in IT leadership, shapes how he approaches teaching directly. When a student is stuck, he is not looking at the problem; he is looking for what is causing it, because solving the root means the symptom does not come back.
Students have called him Chandler, they expect a bad joke every class, and they are never disappointed. He makes people laugh while making them work, and the combination tends to produce results faster than either would alone.
Pao is a co-director, principal teacher, creative director, and the technical backbone for anything that is dancing or teaching at Dance Mambo. She spent years as a full-time ballroom dance professional at Arthur Murray before bringing that precision and depth to the mambo world.
She holds a degree in finance and runs the school's social media and day-to-day operations alongside her teaching.
She also designs and handmakes every costume worn by Dance Mambo performance teams through her label Estela Designs, now exclusive to the academy. Pao will show you exactly how something should be done, why, and when.
Between the two of them, nothing falls through the gap.
Together they have been partners in life for ten years, married for one, and have built Dance Mambo from the ground up as a two-person operation with no employees, no shortcuts, and no intention of compromising the standard to grow faster than the quality allows.
The school exists because Sydney had no shortage of places to learn salsa, but nowhere that treated mambo as a discipline worth pursuing with full seriousness. No structured progression, no curriculum depth, no genuine connection to the living tradition of the style as it is taught and danced by the best in the world.
We built Dance Mambo to fix that, and we have invested over $30,000 every year since to make sure what we teach stays current, accurate, and genuinely worth your time. We study music, history, and culture alongside the movement itself, because you cannot represent this style at a high level without understanding where it comes from. Most teachers could not tell you why it is called salsa or what role the clave plays in the music. We can, and we think that matters.
Teachers at advanced levels in the Sydney scene come to us to train. We do not say this to take credit for anyone's career, we say it because we think it reflects the standard we hold, and the fact that dancers who could go anywhere choose to stay or come back tells us more about whether we are doing this right than any other measure.
We are also proud supporters of Unity Mambo Experience, an independent project bringing the world's leading mambo artists to Australia for an event built around genuine learning rather than performance and spectacle.
It reflects a belief we share about what this community deserves and what events can be when they are built with the right intention. Visit unitymamboexperience.com.au
Fed and Pao are the founders, directors, and sole teachers at Dance Mambo. Since 2018, they have invested over $30,000 per year in direct training with the leading mambo and salsa on2 specialists in New York, Europe, and Latin America and brought every piece of that knowledge back to their Sydney studio.
Their teaching is rooted in the New York style tradition pioneered by Eddie Torres, the style you find at the world's best congresses and on the floors of serious salsa socials everywhere.
They have performed and competed internationally, and they continue to do so because they believe you cannot be a teacher if you stop being a student.
Dance Mambo exists because they could not find anywhere in Sydney that taught Mambo & Salsa the way they imagined it. So they built it.
