by Marco Aquino
For decades, if something significant was happening on a San Antonio stage, there was a good chance Jasmina Wellinghoff was watching. Wellinghoff, the longtime journalist, critic, columnist and poet who documented the city’s cultural life for more than four decades, died April 5, 2026, at age 81. Her career moved through the San Antonio Light, the San Antonio Express-News, San Antonio Woman and eventually her own independent publication, Arts Alive San Antonio. Her family said she wrote thousands of articles and reviews on the arts, health, medicine, social issues and business.
For San Antonio’s dance community, and especially for those of us trying to piece together the city’s flamenco history, the value of that work has only become clearer with time. Wellinghoff did more than tell readers whether a performance succeeded or failed. She recorded who was here, what they were attempting and how one generation of artists connected to the next.
After her death, the San Pedro Playhouse wrote that “Jasmina’s impact on our local theatre landscape cannot be overstated.” Mona Lisa Montgomery, former San Antonio Parks and Recreation cultural programs manager, remembered her as “an excellent writer” who “could be a tough critic,” adding, “thank you, Jasmina, for my team’s first feather.”
When the arts still had a beat
Wellinghoff came out of a period when a city’s newspapers could employ critics who watched the same artistic community over many years. At the San Antonio Light, where she served as theater critic, she became part of the infrastructure of local arts coverage rather than someone parachuting in for a single opening night. She also helped establish the Alamo Theater Arts Council, which began presenting the Globe Awards in 1991, and the organization later named a special-contribution award for her.
That newspaper world was already beginning to disappear. The Light closed in January 1993, eliminating one of San Antonio’s two major daily newspapers, and the decades that followed brought repeated newsroom contractions across the country and in San Antonio. In 2009, the Express-News announced cuts affecting 135 employees and 30 unfilled positions, including roughly 75 newsroom jobs.
Her career crossed the great thinning-out of arts journalism, from staffed newspaper criticism to a landscape of freelancers, nonprofit outlets, independent publications and artists increasingly documenting their own communities. Wellinghoff kept working through all of it.
She saw the flamenco story early
One of the most useful things about Wellinghoff’s writing is that she recognized San Antonio’s flamenco community while it was still taking shape. At the end of 2009, she wrote that San Antonio had “moved closer to becoming a lively center of flamenco teaching and performance.” Read now, the piece feels less like a seasonal dance roundup than a snapshot of a community in motion.
She noted the arrival from Spain of Antonio Granjero and Estefania Ramirez to establish EntreFlamenco, Carmen “La Chiqui” Linares’ return to San Antonio, activity at the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the San Antonio Parks and Recreation dance program’s 75th anniversary. Rather than simply announcing events, she was recording a network of teachers, performers, institutions and venues that were helping shape flamenco in the city. She also understood something essential about the form itself, describing the “organic interaction between musicians and dancers” as one of its hallmarks.
Those details matter now because local arts histories are often reconstructed from fragments. A program disappears, a website goes offline, a venue closes, a company changes names, and suddenly basic questions about who performed where become surprisingly difficult to answer. Wellinghoff’s writing gives dates, names and relationships to moments that might otherwise survive only as memory.
Names, faces, lineages
Her coverage repeatedly returned to individual artists. In December 2009 she profiled Carmen “La Chiqui” Linares after the revered teacher returned to San Antonio, preserving Linares’ thoughts about the difficulty of ever really retiring from flamenco and her desire to train another generation of dancers and teachers. Two years later, Wellinghoff covered the second annual Flamenco Fest at the Cameo Theatre, an early version of what would eventually become WeFlamenco Fest, and documented performers who were part of that moment rather than treating the festival as an isolated event.
In 2012 she wrote about a young Arte y Pasión while the company was still defining itself. Her coverage of Flamencos placed Tamara Adira, then performing as Tamara Saj, within a broader group that included Antonio Arrebola, José Perelló, Steve Arispe, Yiyi Orozco and guest artist Teo Morca. By the end of that year, she had singled out Arrebola’s farruca as one of the memorable dance performances of 2012, while also noting work by EntreFlamenco and Olivia Chacón.
The following year she returned to the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center for Alma de Mujer, again recording the intersection of local and visiting artists around Belinda Menchaca’s company. What makes these stories useful now is not that every review has to be treated as the final word on a performance. It is that, read together, they begin to reveal a genealogy: artists arriving, returning, collaborating, teaching, forming companies and appearing again in new contexts.
After the newsroom years
When newspaper arts coverage diminished, Wellinghoff created another place to continue doing the work. Through Arts Alive San Antonio, she kept interviewing artists, reviewing performances and following the city’s cultural life at a time when fewer institutions were willing to devote consistent space to that kind of reporting. The publication became both a continuation of her journalism and an archive created on her own terms.
Arte y Pasión remained part of that later record. In 2022 she interviewed Tamara Adira about Mercuria and the company’s collaboration with poet Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson. In November 2024, more than a decade after her early coverage of the company, Wellinghoff again sat down with Adira for a long conversation about flamenco, Arte y Pasión and San Antonio’s International Day of Flamenco, writing that Adira had founded the company “to keep the flame of flamenco burning in San Antonio.”
Wellinghoff was still publishing in 2026. Arts Alive San Antonio shows her interviewing artist Lyn Belisle in February, only two months before her death. There is something important in that continuity: she did not simply belong to an earlier golden age of newspaper criticism. She carried the habit of documenting San Antonio’s cultural life forward after the structure that had once supported it had changed.
The archive she left behind
For anyone trying to reconstruct San Antonio’s unusually long relationship with flamenco, Wellinghoff’s work is no longer only criticism or entertainment coverage. It is evidence of an artistic ecosystem at particular moments, connecting the Parks and Recreation dance tradition, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, the Cameo-era Flamenco Fest, visiting Spanish artists, independent companies and generations of local teachers, dancers and musicians.
It also makes a larger point about cultural memory. When newspapers shrink their arts desks, the loss is not always obvious at first because performances continue, artists keep working and audiences still show up. The gap becomes visible years later, when a community turns around and discovers that nobody consistently wrote down what happened, who was there or why it mattered.
Wellinghoff did that work for San Antonio over and over again. Her writing gives us more than a set of old reviews; it gives us a way to see the city’s cultural life accumulating across decades, one performance and one artist at a time. For a community now trying to understand and preserve its own history, that record has become part of the history itself.
Sources & notes
- Jasmina Wellinghoff obituary, San Antonio Express-News, April 12, 2026. Biographical information, her work at the San Antonio Light, the Alamo Theater Arts Council and the founding of Arts Alive San Antonio.
- Arts Alive San Antonio, including the April 2026 memorial notice and Wellinghoff’s final interviews and arts coverage.
- Jasmina Wellinghoff, “Best of 2009: Dance,” San Antonio Express-News/MySA, Dec. 25, 2009. Documents the growth of San Antonio flamenco, EntreFlamenco, Carmen “La Chiqui” Linares, the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the Parks and Recreation dance program.
- Jasmina Wellinghoff, “Flamenco: Teacher shares expertise,” Conexión/MySA, Dec. 2, 2009. Profile of Carmen “La Chiqui” Linares.
- Jasmina Wellinghoff, “‘Flamencos’ is Arte y Pasión’s new work,” San Antonio Express-News, Jan. 4, 2012.
- Jasmina Wellinghoff, “The Best of 2012: Dance,” San Antonio Express-News, Dec. 29, 2012.
- Jasmina Wellinghoff, “Q&A with Tamara Adira, Founder & Artistic Director of Arte y Pasion,” Arts Alive San Antonio, Oct. 31, 2022.
- Jasmina Wellinghoff, “Conversation with Tamara Adira, Flamenco Artist and Company Leader,” Arts Alive San Antonio, Nov. 18, 2024.
