Dancer. Choreographer. Artist. 

Katie Brophy-Chronister is currently living in Oklahoma as a Company Apprentice for RACE Dance Collective, where she trains and creates weekly. She teaches ballet, jazz, tap, lyrical, and hip hop at Shannon Crites Dance Studio in Ardmore, OK. She is currently finishing her last season as a company member of Burlap Sakk Contemporary Dance Company in Atlanta, GA, and travels nationally as a backstage manager and tabulator for Believe National Talent Competition every Spring. 

She graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of South Florida in May 2022 with a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Dance Performance, a concentration in Modern, and a minor in Psychology. She studied ballet and modern technique, improvisation, choreography, dance history, kinesiology, laban movement analysis, and dance pedagogy with USF's nationally-ranked dance program. She has 21 years of dance experience, 11 years of competitive dance, and 8 years of teaching experience. She has worked with renowned dance makers in the industry such as John Parks, Andee Scott, Paula Nuñez, and Michael Foley, and was recognized in the program with a Talent Grant for the 2021-2022 school year along with a spot on the College of the Arts Dean's List. She attended the Radio City Rockettes Summer Intensive from 2017-2019, and continues to take remote classes and travel to New York to continue her education and training in dance. From 2022-2024 she was a Company Dancer and Soloist with Burlap Sakk Dance Company in McDonough, GA, performing in their four original productions and several charity performances, including Dancers For Hope for children with cancer. She is well acquainted in many styles of dance such as ballet, jazz, tap, contemporary, and modern with sub-styles such as Graham, Cunningham, and Horton. 

Artist Statement

PC: Sarah Hamilton Photography

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As an artist, I dance and choreograph to express and convey emotional ideas through my movement, while also incorporating my passion for psychology. I am interested in the connection between body and mind, and how said connection can negatively affect each other based on one’s mental and physical health. Using this idea, I like to experiment with movement involving the whole body and how it changes based on the dancer’s emotions and mental state at the time. A lasting goal of mine is to gain an understanding of the mind using dance and movement, which stem from my eventual aspirations to be a dance therapist.

I create work using my own body as well as others to showcase the connections between body and mind. My work usually begins with a piece of music or with an idea of how to move a specific body part. These starting points give me opportunities for many possible movement patterns and pathways to accent the music and eventually tell a story or theme. Once I have phrase work, I tend to embellish it based on how my dancers move or how the movements feel in my body. I tend to work chronologically, so my piece stays coherent, but I will sometimes be inspired by a specific moment in the music and let the creativity flow. However, I continually come back to internal movement ideas, such as contractions, melting, or collapsing, which tends to reflect inner turmoil.

It is important to me to physicalize these topics that are still not frequently discussed in today’s society, such as mental health and therapy. I also want to display an array of different genres of dance, from ballet and modern to jazz and theatre, to spread the message that all genres of dance are entertaining and worth engagement. I hope to not only spread these messages through my dancing and choreographic work, but to also inspire audiences to leave a performance thinking about these important themes and normalize them.