Elaine Marlowe, who goes by the stage-name of “Elena,” was born in 1940 on the East Coast of a pianist mother and a businessman father. Elena holds a PhD in musicology.

She has been Robin Brown’s companion for more than 20 years and is the artistic director of FlamencoArts Co. in Santa Rosa, California. She teaches flamenco dance there as well as at various workshops and festivals, and has performed from 1985 to 1997 with Clifford Dos Reis Jones’ International Dance Theater and Cuadro Iberico, and since 1997 with FlamencoArts Co. and Soniquete José Galván.

Galván qualifies the beautiful, mesmerizing and truly authentic Elena as “pura” and one of his favorite students world-wide.

Elena was recently featured in Michael Brown’s documentary film My Father, His Flamenco, and I. in which she performed with Robin Brown at the Planète Andalucia in Paris in 2002, and in 2004, for “Petenera—a Flamenco Drama in Music and Dance” at the Jackson Theater in Santa Rosa.