Mary Kate Ford

Mary Kate (MK) Ford (she/they) is an inter/anti-disciplinary artist currently pursuing a MFA for Dance Performance, Choreography, and Pedagogy at the University of Maryland College Park with an inaugural assistantship through the Maya Brin Institute for Technology in New Performance. Her work features elements from dance, film/media studies, queer studies, and visual arts. While at UMD, they have performed in graduate student and faculty works and have had work premiered through the University of Maryland via live performance and ScreenDance festivals. She teaches courses in ScreenDance and Introduction to Dance in addition to leading contemporary technique and yoga classes in the DMV area. 

Mary Kate is originally from Louisville, Kentucky where they graduated from DuPont Manual/Youth Performing Arts School where she studied Fine Arts in Dance and Visual Arts. She performed and choreographed with Moving Collective and the Louisville Dance Series. MK received their BFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where they graduated with honors and a focus in Performance, Dance Documentation, and ScreenDance Choreography. Upon graduation, Ford worked as the Assistant Media Coordinator and Technologist for the department in addition to designing and facilitating a Yoga Practicum course, an Introduction to Dance course, and assisting with undergraduate dance concerts. While at UIUC, her work was featured in student concerts and film festivals. She performed and studied most notably with Abby Zbikowski, Jennifer Monson, Endalyn Taylor, Tere O'Connor, Reneé Wadleigh, Cynthia Oliver, Kemal Nance, Kirstie Simson, Jan Erkert, Roxane De'Orleans Juste, and Rebecca Nettl-Fiol. Her work has been featured in the Hindsight Dance Series (Louisville, KY), j e l l o dance series (Chicago, IL), the Cleveland Dance Festival (Cleveland, OH), Third Coast Dance Film Festival, the ACDA ScreenDance Festival, and more. MK has attended numerous dance intensives, including the American Dance Festival, Countertechnique OBOC, the New Dialect summer intensive, the STREB labs, the David Dorfman Dance intensives, and more. Ford holds a 200-H Yoga Teacher Certification through Yoga Alliance. Ford's additional freelance work spans most notably in the realms of Dance Documentation, Video Editing, Visual Art, Web Design, Graphic Design and Animation, Social Media Management, and Online Streaming. She currently is teaching Contemporary Dance Techniques and Yoga Asana in the DMV area.