Lynette in Morocco

Lynette in Morocco, June 2011
photo by Galia Cohen Peres

The Gilded Serpent presents...

Lynette Harris

Publisher & Editor

Lynette Harris, innovator, publisher, editor, and owner of the Gilded Serpent, has been in involved in the Middle Eastern dance and music community since 1981. As a child, Lynette’s first love with music was on the violin from age 6 and piano at age 11, then much later she continued to study the style of Arabic violin with Devija Delgado, and Georges Lammam. In 1985, she began performing our dance in Arabic, Persian, and Greek venues in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area. Preferring live music she performed for many years at Taverna Athena in Oakland, Pasha in San Francisco and Scheherezade in South San Francisco. She credits Najia Marlyz as her primary dance mentor and Sausan for giving her her first regular position in her own restaurant, The Grapeleaf. Lynette’s love of Raqs Sharqi, its music, and ethnic cultures eventually took her on an inspirational trip to Egypt in 1991 with Najia, Mohamed El Mouzayen and Lillian, where they were able to witness and experience Egyptian music, dance, and culture in person.  Lynette also traveled to Greece at the end of that trip and enjoyed the culture and performing the dance there with the adventurous Rhea Marsh. Along with many others, Bert Balladine was a significant consultant in her career as a dancer and as publisher of Gilded Serpent.

A true admirer of modern technology, she became one of the first in the Arabic dance field to create and maintain a Middle Eastern dance website, her own dance publicity site- SnakesKin.com - in 1994 (now used mostly for home and family projects),and subsequently, became mentor to her Middle Eastern dance friends, helping her colleagues start their own websites. In 1999, with the help and support of many, Lynette conceptualized and became publisher of the first Middle Eastern Dance web based magazine, GildedSerpent.com. Its articles have a wide subject range, including: historical research, a world-renowned (and pet project) oral history series titled “North Beach Memories”, up-to-the-minute news, product reviews (such as books, CDs and DVDs), show reviews, opinion pieces, photographic spreads, and how-to articles.

Gilded Serpent's formal mission is to become Middle Eastern dance's journal of record. This goal has begun to be realized as many research projects constantly refer to its content as source research material in lectures featured in several universities' Middle Eastern studies departments and physical education/dance departments. Gilded Serpent can boast a daily international readership of 1000s. Recent surveys show that GildedSerpent.com is, in fact, the most widely read Middle Eastern dance web-zine in the world, far outstripping those that are printed subscription publications. As publisher of Gilded Serpent, Lynette’s duties range from web-management and editing to public relations, advertising, bookkeeping, colorful layout of articles with unparalleled graphic design, photographic and video-graphic documentation, general public outreach, and all the nameless tasks involved in operating such an ambitious enterprise. Lynette’s tasks and duties in her role as editor, have taken her around the world as she covers international dance and music festivals in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and North Africa thus far. Lynette welcomes all types of informative and entertaining articles about Middle Eastern dance and music world-wide. (Article writing and advertising guidelines are available on the web site itself.) As editor of Gilded Serpent, Lynette always makes time to advise and help her dance and music friends and colleagues in their many dance projects.

E-mail: editor@gildedserpent.com

Web site:www.gildedserpent.com

Articles, photos, and videos on Gilded Serpent by or about Lynette