Cathie Caraker is an international dance artist who has been working at the edges of movement research, improvisation and performance for over 25 years. She is the director of MAMMALdance, a forum for embodied, inter-media research and performance. A native of San Francisco, she moved to Amsterdam in the 1980s, where she graduated from the School for New Dance Development (SNDO), eventually joining the faculty from 1995 – 2005. Her dance work has been influenced by post-modern ideas and practices including the Judson Church movement, European new dance /music improvisaton, Contact Improvisation and somatics. In 2005 she returned to San Francisco.

Her performance work has been produced and presented by theaters including Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace at St Mark’s Church, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the University Settlement House, the New York Improvisation Festival, the NesTheaters in Amsterdam, CounterPULSE in San Francisco and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. She has collaborated with numerous artists including Gonnie Heggen, Robert Steijn, Meredith Monk, Nancy Stark Smith, Mike Vargas, Daniel Lepkoff, Andrew Harwood, Felice Wolfzahn, KJ Holmes, David Hurwith, Katarina Eriksson, Rosemary Hannon, Ray Chung, Vitali Kononov, Henry Kaiser, Jerry Smith, Ronja Ver and Pipaluk Supernova.

Her work seeks to expand conventional perceptions of dance and she frequently collaborates with improvising dancers and musicians. In 2009 she was an Artist In Residence at CounterPULSE, where she created a science fiction dance installation (ANIMoid, 2009) with Swedish dance artist Katarina Eriksson and video artist Jerry Smith. More recently she has performed duets with guitarist Henry Kaiser (Moment’s Notice, Berkeley 2012 and 2013), collaborated on a David Bowie dance-ical with Rosemary Hannon and Katarina Eriksson (Danceground artists residency, 2011) and performed as the Wolf in Rosemary Hannon’s choreographic take on Little Red Riding Hood, The Big Bad and the Little Good (Studio 12 artists residency, 2012). She has worked extensively within the solo form, most recently exploring the concept of the morphing body in her solo ‘bubble’, performed at the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (2010) and at Moment’s Notice, Berkeley.

Cathie is a sought-after teacher and has shared her unique approach to movement research in the creative process at universities and arts institutes across the Americas and Europe. She has been a guest artist at de Beweging in Antwerp, Contredanse in Brussels, Tanzfabriek Berlin, Bewegungs Arts Freiberg, Chisenhale Dance Space in London, Movement Research in NYC, and American colleges including Amherst, Bennington, Middlebury, Mt Holyoke, Brown, University of Rochester NY and Denison University. She was on the faculty of the School for New Dance Development / Amsterdam School for the Arts for 10 years.

Cathie is a graduate of the innovative SNDD / Department of Choreography of the Amsterdam School for the Arts. She also holds an MFA in dance from Bennington College and is a certified practitioner of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC), as well as a longtime Pilates and Gyrotonic® instructor.

Her writings on BMC as a somatic approach to dance education have been published by the Belgian dance journal Nouvelles de Danse.