“Compelling” and “full of gestured conflict and impish daring” (Chicago Tribune), Kate Corby’s dance works have been seen extensively in the Midwest, New York, California, Seattle, Atlanta and internationally in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Taiwan and Hungary, where she traveled as a Fulbright fellow. Corby, featured in Dance Magazine as one of six choreographers “on the cusp of making waves in the larger dance world,” has been a professor at the UW since 2008, and is the inaugural Buff Brennan Professor of Dance. She served as the Dance Department chair from 2017-2020 and the chair of the Department of Theatre & Drama from 2022-2024. She established Kate Corby & Dancers in the Midwest with Chicago-based dancers Erin Kilmurray, Emily Miller, and Anna Normann in 2009. In addition to regular seasons in Chicago and Madison, some of the company’s past projects include: the Chicago Cultural Center’s SpinOff Festival, the World Dance Alliance-Americas Festival in Vancouver, BC and Puebla, Mexico, a collaboration and live performance with cellist Zoë Keating, commissioned by the Wisconsin Union Theater, the Live Art, Live Rio! Festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and The A.W.A.R.D. Show! 2010: Chicago at the Dance Center of Columbia College. From 1999-2004, Corby was based in San Francisco, where her projects were supported by the Zellerbach Family Fund and Theater Bay Area, and performed in the Cowell Theater and ODC Theater, among others. Corby’s choreography has been called “ingenious” by the Chicago Reader, “haunting and memorable” by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and was a Critics’ Pick in Time Out Chicago five times from 2011-2012.
More recently, Corby began creating dance films and her work has been screened extensively since 2016, including in Flatlands Dance Film Festival, the Tiny Dance Film Festival, the Midwest RAD Festival, the Jacksonville Dance Film Festival, the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Cinema, and Screen.dance Scotland, among many others. In addition to teaching master classes nationally and internationally, Corby served on the faculties of Beloit College, Columbia College Chicago, and the Pedagogy Department of the Hungarian Dance Academy. Corby also co-founded and co-directed Performing Ourselves, a community dance program based in Madison which employed undergraduate dance students to teach movement and wellness curricula in local community centers and schools. Performing Ourselves served a total of approximately 1,000 5-14 year olds from 2012-2022, and was a founding partner of the UW-Madison’s Community Arts Collaboratory.
Corby received her MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was the recipient of the Nettl Award for outstanding student choreography and was a teaching assistant and a University Fellow. She found dance as a theater major at Beloit College and spent much of her childhood in rural Wisconsin, graduating from Three Lakes High School in Oneida County.
Select Awards
- Buff Brennan Professor of Dance (2022)
- Creative Communities Grant for Performing Ourselves, Wisconsin Arts Board (2019)
- Distinguished Faculty Award, UW-Madison, School of Education (2019)
- Grant for Performing Ourselves, Evjue Foundation (2019)
- Joyce J. and Gerald A. Bartell Award in the Arts, Arts Institute (2015)
- Vilas Associate Award (2015)
- DanceBridge Residency, Chicago Office of Tourism and Culture in association with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2012)
- Wisconsin Idea Endowment for Performing Ourselves, Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin (2012)
- Artistic Associates Program, Links Hall (2011)
- Nettl Award for Outstanding Student Choreography, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign (2007)
- Fulbright Fellowship to Hungary, The Fulbright Program