INSIDE OUT RADIO: Interviews Gina Cloud

Gina was born in New Orleans, and like the gumbo this famous city is known for, she is quite a mixture. Her heritage is Creole, made up of the African, Native American and various European ethnicities. “The question I was asked most while growing up – and even still today – is: what are you? I feel like a citizen of the world, in that almost everyone I meet sees a part of him or herself reflected in my face because of my ancestral tapestry.” Due to the tense racial politics in the South, Gina’s parents relocated to Los Angeles when she was 6 years old. At age 16, Gina fell deeply in love with dance when she began to study jazz technique, and performed locally for several years as a member of a dance company in Los Angeles. Gina also discovered a passion for theatre and writing while attending UCLA . She has also studied yoga, voice, theatre, African and Brazilian dance, all of which brought her into deeper relationship with her body, setting her on a path of self-empowerment and self-discovery. With her body as teacher and guru, she realized her path was one of healing. With all that in her voudou bag (she is from New Orleans, after all!), Gina wanted to make a difference in the lives of other, and to share her life experience with others. She is a deeply devoted teacher, healer, dancer, writer, and mother of a ’tween daughter. She has spent the last 20 years developing this body of work based on the powerful—often misunderstood, misrepresented, even despised— biological cycles of women's lives, through her own personal journey into self-mastery, and the idea that women can and do heal themselves. Her work, which is the alchemical blending of techniques from every part of the world, teaches self-transformation through self-empowerment, and the outcome is deep and beautiful in the areas of self-love, self-respect, self-esteem, and self-confidence, all through the powerful medium of the Feminine. Gina also has a line of women's lingerie, Wild Nectar, in