Our Mission

OlaFlorArt highlights and empowers individual artists and collectives that center around honoring the legacy of traditional dance and music, while cultivating the exploration of new representations. Through collaborations and community outreach, we amplify the value of multicultural connection and building diverse cultural narratives and forms of expression.

Aligning ourselves in the advocacy for social and environmental justice, we believe arts to be a powerful tool through which we can raise awareness and reimagine possibilities for a more sustainable world. By nurturing interdisciplinary and intergenerational artists, we seek to bridge tradition and innovation for more inclusive spaces.

Meet the Team

Karla Florez

Executive Director
Karla Florez Albor is a Colombian-USA performing artist, director, writer and teacher. She works to empower communities through cultural awareness and focus on the educational environment and social justice. She presents her work as a multidisciplinary artist in no conventional spaces and or theater. She has extensive professional experience in the field of dance, spanning about thirty years, performing, and showcasing traditional Folk dances and contemporary pieces as well as researching dance movement, body expression, dramatic action, and traditional dance forms mostly from the Caribbean and Momposino Depression of Colombia.

Florez is a Journalist from Universidad Autónoma del Caribe, Colombia, Master in Applied Lingüistic from Jaen University, Spain. She is a permanent researcher in different fields and has relevant experience in grant writing, choreography and directing multidisciplinary collaborative pieces. She was a mentee of NYFA immigrant mentoring program 2005. CityArtistsCorps NY 2021 with Rueda de Cumbia, a post COVID project. She has worked collaboratively with artist Mala Desai as a collaborator at Angikcuerpo and Silent Streets.
Kike Olaya

Member
Kike has been involved in the performing arts since early on, actively participating in Carnival's dances and custom characters of his hometown of Barranquilla in the Caribbean coast of Colombia.
In NYC he has studied social sciences and performing arts. He’s also lived for few years in the 90s in Bogota, Colombia where he became part of Ombligo'e Kazabe, a contemporary dance company where he received training in contemporary dance techniques, percussion, and theater, participating and performing in theatrical venues and site-specific locations in festivals and cultural programs in different cities in Colombia and Cuba.
Kike has been part of KFSD in Queens, NY, participating in presentations in schools, libraries, outdoor events, festivals, and various other events. In the last thee years Kike has been producing and presenting monologues and/or performative spoken-word works-in-progress, most using contents from his critical writings about the so-called mental health system in NYC and the USA at large.
Juliana María Moreno

Finance & Operations
She began her studies in music at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá before completing her degree in Accounting at Brooklyn College.
With a background in the arts and a career in finance, she brings both creativity and structure to the company’s operations.
Eyleen Santiago

Secretary
Journalist, community and media manager. She is a planner at an advertising agency in Barranquilla, specializing in designing strategies that drive brand growth and positioning. With a specialization in Strategic Marketing and currently pursuing a Master's in Marketing Management at the Universidad de la Costa, she combines rigorous analysis with creative sensibility.
Passionate about benchmarks, brand architectures, and the challenges that transform businesses, she stands out for her empathetic approach and commitment to taking each brand to the next level.