About
Dancing With Her
working towards a more inclusive wedding industry
In 2016, Founders, Tara Baker and Arlia Hassell became an engaged couple. The first thing they did was head to a large magazine store in search of wedding inspiration.
What they were presented with was a selection of media that left them feeling unrepresented. They felt deflated in a time that should have been about celebration.
And, it’s with that in mind that they began Dancing With Her, a publication, both in digital and in print, that empowers a community of women who love women.
Dancing With Her offers a robust and growing digital space that shares the real stories of couples as well as offering advice to those people who are planning their own wedding day. It’s an opportunity for a community that has otherwise been largely unrepresented within the wedding space to be inspired.
In November 2017, Dancing With Her Magazine was launched and it is the first wedding magazine of its kind. It went off with a bang and now reaches 40+ countries around the globe.
Dancing With Her isn’t a huge media company, instead, it’s just those two humans who were inspired to create something for their own community working from their home office in Dja Dja Wurrung (Bendigo, Victoria, Australia).
Photography by Jackson Grant Weddings
Empowering a community that aren’t often included in the wedding world.
Photography by Paloma Havlik Photography
Dancing With Her Journey
Where we’ve been, where we are going
An Idea Sparked
After our own engagement, we were left feeling uninspired- the wedding industry was heteronormative and we didn’t see ourselves represented in the inspiration that exists.
We knew, if we felt the way we did about it all, there had to be others out there who felt the same way, and so an ‘inspiration Instagram account’ quickly grew into a blog.
A Magazine is Launched
Towards the end of 2017 we released the first edition of Dancing With Her Magazine, and shipped the launch volume to 40+ countries around the world.
Marriage Equality Achieved
We’re Australian, and just as those magazines started landing in letterboxes, the Australian Government finally changed the Marriage Act to acknowledge that marriage is a union between two people.
Awards and International Speaking
In the year before the world ultimately shut down, we traveled the world speaking on stages in the US and Hong Kong about the impact that Dancing With Her continues to have on the wedding industry.
We also won a handful of awards, and landed ourselves in the pages of Forbes Magazine.
Industry Change
Over the years we’ve branched out into education, we’ve seen the ripple effects of our work in the wedding space towards an industry that is more inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community.
We’ve shared 1500+ LGBTQ+ stories that were otherwise being left untold, and connect with millions each month across our social platforms who are planning their very own celebrations of love.
But, the work doesn’t end here. There’s so much more than needs to be done.
Meet the Founders,
Arlia and Tara Baker
Hello, there!
We are Arlia (blonde hair) and Tara (brown hair), the two humans behind Dancing With Her. We’re two lovers who met at work. For Tara, it was certainly a, ‘I need to know more about this human,’ moment. Funnily enough, that feeling wasn’t mutual, but persistence paid off!
Before Dancing With Her, Arlia was a jewelry engineer (a fancy way of saying a creative whose medium was metals) and Tara was working in aged care as a nursing assistant. Two careers very different from creating a publication!
We kind’ve had two proposals, only Arlia doesn’t remember the first one. Long story short, we’d decided to elope and just hours later Arlia was having life-saving brain surgery. She doesn’t remember those conversations, and quite frankly, we needed to take a step back on planning any sort of wedding and focus on Arlia’s recovery.
About 18 months later, we felt like we were at a place where we able to move forward with a marriage, and Tara proposed on a romantic surprise getaway to the same city we fell in love, Melbourne.
That second proposal led to us starting Dancing With Her, and what a rollercoaster our lives have been since then.
We finally eloped in 2024. Something private – paperwork over lunch kind’ve thing, and it was perfect.
We’re also (really lucky) mums to two really cool humans.
Photography by Alice Acton
Let’s Connect
Want to reach out?
We’d love to chat.
