Francesca Balagtas, aka Sassi Fran, was born in San Francisco but raised in Las Vegas. The styles they trained in throughout childhood and adolescence included tap, ballet, jazz, hip hop, street jazz, Hula, Tahitian, and Maori. At the age of 18, Sassi moved back to San Francisco to attend San Francisco Art Institute to receive her BFA in Sculpture. Although her studies were in visual arts, she always hungered for dance. In 2015 and 2016 she began dancing with various dance groups in San Francisco such as Bay Area Flash Mob, Sexitude, and Bay Area Dancers and began teaching her own original street jazz, pop, and hip hop choreography at BAFM and BAD. In 2017, Sassi and her close friend, Patrick Santos, founded K-Pop-Up, a K-pop dance class and group as a way to find other K-Pop lovers who also want to dance. Today Sassi continues to train herself in more styles such as pole, heels, vogue, and waacking to enrich her own repertoire. Throughout Sassi’s near decade of teaching, it is always their goal to create a safe, welcoming, and inclusive learning environment that is friendly to people of all dance levels. In addition to teaching dance around the San Francisco Bay Area, Sassi is a local drag performer who incorporates K-Pop and her own original choreography into many of her drag performances. Sassi produces and hosts NUNA, a bi-annual queer K-Pop dance party/drag show at The Stud in the SOMA district.