Jody/Ryker has been training in circus arts since 2011. They specialize in pole dance, aerial hoop, and acrobatics. Jody has performed all around California at music festivals, specialty events, and variety circus shows, including the Santa Cruz Boardwalk’s Circus Side Show, California’s Great America’s “Halloween Haunt”, Northern Nights Music Festival, and Hubba Hubba Revue. Ryker enjoys choreographing dramatic acts that showcase their unique aerial and pole creations. In 2015, Jody founded the performance group Pole Diversity (www.polediversity.com). They have directed, produced, and choreographed several circus shows as well as sets for Santa Cruz’s national dance week event. Pole Diversity’s mission is to share the strength, beauty, and diversity of pole dance acts in circus and other settings. Ryker has taught pole dance and aerial hoop at various studios around California, from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. Jody greatly enjoys creating curriculum, training programs, and combos for their students and for fellow pole instructors. They are always creating new transitions and finding new shapes to share with others who are also passionate about pole. They also enjoy developing new drills for strength, coordination, and mobility for their students and for themselves when working towards a specific movement goal. Jody enjoys starting their training with a question and seeing where it takes them. They recently developed a new curriculum for their workshop “Appreciating Diverse Bodies in Pole Dance” (first offered on Dr. Jen Crane’s platform MyFlex) to share teaching practices they developed to improve the safety and inclusivity of pole instruction. Further, Ryker hopes to shift traditional teaching mindsets from viewing differences as deficits to seeing how differences in bodies can be appreciated and used to create new skills. Jody shares their ideas and knowledge on IG (@polediversity.coach & @jody.polediversity) and on their blog (https://polediversity.com/blog/ ) Jody graduated with a master’s degree in pure mathematics from UCSC. They wrote the paper Torsion of Elliptic Curves over Quadratic Fields with their research. Jody currently teaches math at Foothill College and is also working on a series of articles on applications of mathematics to circus arts.