Caitlyn Schrader is a dance artist, educator, curator, and choreographer currently based in North Carolina. As a mover and maker, she is steeped in the practice of Safety Release Technique and rooted in somatic perspectives through her personal investigations of yoga, Kinetic Awareness, and Cortical Field Re-education, applying these approaches within teaching, learning, and the choreographic process.
A New York native, Caitlyn has made her way to Boston, Massachusetts, France, and Australia before arriving in North Carolina. She has taught extensively within private and public institutions in New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Southern France. Caitlyn has been a member of professional dance companies, BIODANCE (NY) and EgoArt, Inc. (MA), as well as performed in works by several independent choreographers: William (Bill) Evans, Lane Gifford/LaneCo Arts (NYC), Heidi Henderson, Annie Kloppenberg, and Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group (NYC) to name a few. Her live and filmic works have been presented widely across the Northeast, the South, and abroad in Ireland.
She functions within the belief that the act of making dance is a social practice; she strives to use dance as a strategy to construct and invite diverse experiences, exploring how dance intersects with life, challenging easy classifications through social provocation and immersive platforms. A theme of her choreographic works is to probe the traditional ways dance is experienced and presented, creating environments that exist between the expected and unexpected; her works have taken the hybrid forms of installations, full-length dance works, and series of events or happenings. Caitlyn is equally passionate about providing platforms for artists and their communities to collaborate, engage, and exchange.
In addition to her solo works, Caitlyn makes collaborative work under the moniker DanSeries Collective (DSC), whom she co-founded with kt williams in 2022, currently presenting in both North Carolina and Illinois. DSC’s dance discography takes the form of series, typically placed in public locations, and always involves Doc Martens. She is also director of liminality project, her company that presents group choreographic works, which she founded in 2023. liminality project finds value in practices that are rooted in community, experimentation, horizontal integration of disciplines, and authentic human relationships.
She earned an MFA in Dance (Choreography) from the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) (2022), an MS from the University of Rochester (2011), and a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges (2010). At present, she holds a dual-role at UNCG – Director of the School of Art’s off-campus art gallery and of Community Engagement; she also adjuncts in the Schools of Dance and Art.
Most recently, she was a recipient of the NC Artist Support Grant (2023) and the North Carolina Dance Festival’s Artist Residency Program (2022-23) which supported liminality project’s first evening-length work, make me your manifesto, that premiered at Lake Daniel Park, Greensboro (2023); presented two new experimental works at Black Mountain College’s ReViewing Conference & {RE}Happening event (2023/24); co-presented Safety Release Technique’s pedagogical methods at the Body Mind Centering Conference (2023); and co-curated the first Greensboro iteration of Meshroom, an open space performative environment, in partnership between UNCG & Duke Arts (2024).
www.caitlynschrader.com
IG: @caitlyn_schrader
Photo by Hannah Long
Class: Safety Release Technique (SRT)