Tia Stokes Bio

Tia Stokes, whose family settled in St. George when she was ten, soon fell in love with dance while training with her older sister Irene. She began auditioning as a senior at Hurricane High School and soon bagged her first professional job dancing for Beyoncé Knowles at the Billboard Music Awards. In the following years, she moved to Los Angeles and worked with actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, the boy band B2K, performed at NBA and NFL games, and also taught at dance camps.

In 2007, she was being managed by Britney Spears’ father, Jamie, who had offered her a contract. However, she felt a sudden urge to commit herself to the Lord and decided to return to St. George. She formed the adult hip-hop dance team, Kalamity, and while she was not sure why she chose the name, right before the group’s first public performance, a member was diagnosed with leukemia. She immediately found the group’s purpose and decided to donate the money from the performance to pay the dancer’s medical bills. Up until early 2021, the group, which has the motto “We dance for a cause, not for applause”, had raised nearly a million to help several families experiencing real-life calamities.

Tia Bee Stokes was born on January 10, 1986 in California, United States, to Clayton and Irene Ah Quin as the youngest of seven siblings. Growing up in a large loving family, she had decided early on that she wanted eight children, one more than her mother, and all boys. In 2008, she married her then-boyfriend, Andy Stokes, an NFL player who later coached at Dixie State and at Timpview High School in Orem. The two went on to have four sons and a daughter. In 2015, the then-mother-of-three decided to help her good friend Chelsea, a dancer at Kalamity who was having difficulty in getting pregnant, by donating her egg. The IVF process was successful and her friend welcomed a daughter named Giselle. The two families are close and Tia’s children treat Giselle as their sister. Tia mentioned that even though she struggled with the decision, she is happy about the whole thing.

Tia Stokes was only 16 when, after donating blood during a Red Cross drive, she was told by doctors that she might develop leukemia later. Her father was Chinese-Hawaiian while her mother was Samoan, and the disease was not uncommon in the Pacific Island culture. Much later, while pregnant with her only daughter Rosie, Tia constantly felt sick, for which she initially blamed her pregnancy. The symptoms increased even after the baby arrived in August 2019, and she was treated unsuccessfully with antibiotics for pneumonia several times.

In early 2020, after COVID-19 emerged, her doctors decided to test her for the virus, but she was rather diagnosed with leukemia and had to undergo chemotherapy. Undaunted, she began documenting her experience in short videos which included one short dance or at least slight movements of her head or hands. Her videos went viral on social media, earning her millions of fans and the nickname, “Cancer Dancer”. However, the chemotherapy had to be cancelled due to its adverse effects on her frail body, which according to the doctors, needed a bone marrow transplant. To make things worse, she contracted COVID-19 and had to fight it with “no immune system” as any treatment would have ruined her chances at a successful transplant. Luckily, one of her brothers was a 100% match, which she termed “a miracle”. She underwent the transplant procedure in December 2020, but was hit with the side-effect, “graft versus host disease”, as the donor immune system began attacking her “foreign” body. She had to be administered steroids to survive, but gained weight rapidly and was unrecognizable from her former self, for which she was criticized by the very fans who had encouraged her earlier. Nevertheless, Tia continued to spread body-positive messages and pictures to become an inspiration for people struggling with body image.