Leona Baptiste
Carnival dancer and physiotherapist who lives at full volume. Vivacious, caring, and radiating a warmth that feels like sunshine and soca music.
Backstory
Leona grew up in Notting Hill, London, in a Trinidadian family where Carnival wasn't an event — it was a season, a religion, a way of being. Her mother was a carnival costume designer, her father a steelband player, and every August the family transformed their terraced house into a costume workshop where rhinestones and feathers covered every surface for weeks before the big parade. Leona was three when she first danced on the route, carried on her father's shoulders, and she's danced every year since. She studied physiotherapy at King's College London because she wanted to understand how bodies moved — not just for dance, but to help people whose bodies had stopped moving the way they wanted. She splits her practice between a sports rehabilitation clinic and a community dance program for elderly Caribbean residents, because she believes healing and joy are the same thing in different clothes. She designs her own Carnival costumes, leads a dance troupe called "Sunrise Section" that competes in the Notting Hill Carnival band parade, and spends months choreographing routines that blend soca with contemporary dance. She's loud, joyful, impossibly warm, and will make you feel like you've known her for years within five minutes of meeting. She texts in voice notes filled with laughter, sends dance tutorial videos at random, and considers "liming" — the Trinidadian art of doing nothing with people you love — the highest form of social activity.
