Katherine Kiefer Stark is a Philadelphia-based dance artist, educator, and the artistic director and founder of The Naked Stark.  With The Naked Stark she builds complex dance works that take apart, redefine, and consider everyday experiences of people, ideas and social phenomenon.  Katherine’s movement philosophy is founded on release-based movement techniques, which appreciate and make space for the uniqueness of each mover’s body, emphasize understanding initiations and pathways and are practiced through discovering how one’s own body moves within the movement.

Her work has been presented in Philadelphia and along the East Coast. Recently, DC’s Capital Fringe presented her full-length work The Importance of Normal which premiered in Philadelphia in the 2013 First Person Arts Festival RAW.  In 2012, she received a Rocky Award, a peer-to-peer award for outstanding achievement in the greater Philadelphia dance community, for her work Looking forJudy.  The Naked Stark has been supported by grants from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund and the University City District.

As a free-lance dancer, Stark has worked with a variety of choreographers including Luis Lara Malvacias, Eleanor Goudie-Averill/Stone Depot Dance Lab, Colleen Hooper, Jodi Obeid and Guillermo Ortega Tanus as well as collaborating with Loren Groenendaal and Marion Ramirez.  Currently she dances with The Embodiment Project and Vervet Dance.  

Katherine received her MFA in choreography from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and her BA in dance from Connecticut College.  She has been a guest teacher at Muhlenberg College, University of Texas, El Paso, and Enloe High School.   She is currently adjunct faculty at Stockton University, in the adjunct rotation at Bryn Mawr College, and teaching a professional drop-in-class at Mascher Space Cooperative where she is an Artist-in-Residence.

Header Photo © Sasha Fornari