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 studies takes an autoethnographic approach into her bodily archive to help situate herself amongst multiple cultures and binaries as a bisexual Mexican woman. Her interests emerge through both performance and choreography by using gesture 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 choreographers 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 she 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.”