Originally from Victoria Texas, Katelyn Perez is an MFA in Dance Candidate on the performance track at the University of Iowa and holds a BFA from Sam Houston State University. As a performer, researcher, and choreographer, her research takes an autoethnographic approach into her bodily archive to help situate herself amongst multiple cultures and binaries as a bisexual Latinx woman. Her interests emerge through both performance and choreography by using gesture to present an ability to migrate deeply in our continuously changing bodies to bring to the forefront lived histories to achieve a more conscious understanding of our identities concerning one’s sociopolitical environments.

At SHSU, she worked with professors such as Alethea Alexander, Joshua Manculich, Francisco Graciano, and Adele Nickel.  In 2020, her dance film, “Sinking in Her Thoughts”, was chosen to be presented virtually with Danceworks Chicago’s DanceChance. Her piece “ceaseless” was nominated in 2021 for the South-Central ACDA Conference and was selected to teach two masterclasses at the 2023 North-Central ACDA Conference. Additionally, she has attended summer programs such as the National Choreography Intensive where she received a full scholarship through Regional Dance of America to create and set multiple works on students for two weeks. While pursuing her MFA degree, she has performed works by choreographers Danielle Russo, Zena Bibler, Stephanie Miracle, and Melinda Meyers. Her service projects for the UIowa Dance Department have been as a dramaturg/rehearsal assistant for Danielle Russo’s work “third floor up, second door on the right with the double-pane, south-facing window” and as a rehearsal director for the dance department’s restaging of Martha Graham’s “Panorama.”

As an educator, Perez values students having autonomy over their learning and having a student-centered approach inside both a classroom and a studio. Principles of collaboration, conversation, and negotiation present themselves in her teaching youth ballet/pointe classes as well as in a university setting through teaching nonmajor technique courses. Her teaching methods of shifting the class dynamics away from teacher-as-dictator and towards teacher-as-facilitator gives students who may come from varying backgrounds an opportunity to find connection and awareness of themselves directly ties into her research of taking inward perspectives into the cultural practices that are inscribed into the body.

Research Interests:

Autoethnography

Gesture

Performance and Choreography

Latinx Studies

Queer Studies

Courses Taught:

Beginning Ballet

Beginning Jazz

Intermediate Jazz