Katie Baer Schetlick is a dance artist and educator who summons movement to challenge static, singular notions of “the human” and “the body”. In her research, creative work, and teaching, she centers embodied learning, collaborative scholarship and making, and active reimagining through praxis.
Katie uses dance and movement to grapple with how ideas of humanity appear on the stage and in everyday life and proposes practices that critically play with the structures of theatrical space —architectural, historical, affective— to destabilize understandings of what it means to be human. Many of these practices ultimately ask, what if we instead rehearsed our inevitable extinction, what new modes of living and dying together might emerge?
Appearing as installations, movement scores, site-responsive performances, workshops, choreographed walks, and dances, Katie’s work, often in collaboration with other artists and scholars, has been presented in Brazil, Egypt, Poland, Holland and several cities in the U.S.
Katie has facilitated workshops at the UVa School of Architecture, New Museum, CLASSCLASSCLASS, Electric Fish Studio, Cumulus Dance, and the Dance Studies Association conference. Her writing has been published in ImaginedTheatres, Movement Research Performance Journal, Critical Correspondence, and Building Alliances for Social Engagement. During her six years as a founding member of Yaa Samar! Dance Theatre, she performed both domestically and internationally in Jordan and Palestine. As a freelance performer, Katie has worked with The Francesca Harper Project, Susan Marshall, Athena Kokoronis, Shandoah Goldman, Zap McConnell, and Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell. Active and ongoing collaborations include projects with Zena Bibler and with Conrad Cheung and Anna Hogg as part of the artist collective, nonhumanities.
Katie holds an MFA in dance from Hollins University, a Masters in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a BFA in Dance with a minor in Anthropology from the Ailey/Fordham BFA program. She is currently an assistant professor of Dance at the University of Virginia.