MARY KATE FORD
artist's statement
My work is visual, from-the-gut, multi-mediated, and stubbornly D.I.Y.. Rooted in queer, grassroot, punk, and street cultures - my work is for dreaming. I am inspired by urgent and collective action, inspired by subversion and distortion, inspired by grief and pleasure, inspired by families, lovers, and kin. I harness theories demonstrated through queer theory, critical race theory, visual arts, digital humanities, and film. My interest in technology is in its communicative ability, its illustrative design, its pliability and failures, and its tools to craft the fantastic. I aim to find wordless places with my friends where the soft unspeakable parts of our anger, our love, our grief, and our imaginations can be witnessed, platformed, and protected. I am an antidisciplinary cyborg of bodily and machine learning and I animate this perspective to spill and throw personal, heartfelt stories through dance. This work plumes into shape through collaborative multidisciplinary crafting with choreography, visual art + film, sound, and installation. Open to the neighborhood, My process is akin to a backyard fort where someone might find scattered and salvaged vestiges of projects, parties, barbecues, and painting have occurred. My work is always bodily and my movement journey reflects multiplicities of lineages within contemporary U.S. multi-diasporic dancing, including contemporary modern, floorwork, street styles, most pits, and ballet.
BIO
BIO; TLDR
MK Ford (they/them) is an inter/anti-disciplinary wind-powered dance cyborg currently based in D.C.. Their work features elements from dance, film/media studies, and visual arts. Their performative and choreographic work takes the shape of live performance, ScreenDance, and installation. She has gotten DOWN with lots of amazing choreographers and is currently performing with Kendra Portier, Brit Falcon, and more. MK has premiered work at various dance or film festivals around the U.S., and they currently teach dance techniques, screen-centered theory+creative process, and yoga in the DMV.
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BIO: for the long-form fans
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MK Ford (they/them) is a dance artist currently pursuing a MFA in 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. Their work features elements from dance, film/media studies, digital humanities, queer theory, and visual arts. Their performative and choreographic work takes the shape of live performance, screendance, and installation. MK holds a BFA in Dance Performance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Ford’s pursuits in the arts are largely informed by their interests in intersectional strategies of subversion, distortion, knowledge translation, disruption, radical healing + pleasure, satire, gaze/surveillance, archive, time lapse, and glitch activation. MK is an artist working within realms of embodied moving practices laced with queer, C.R.T., digital humanities, and ecological theories of human+machine networks. Ford was initially grown in Louisville, Kentucky where they were introduced to grassroots, community legacies, and D.I.Y. mechanisms and this often is proposed in their work through melancholy, macabre, satire, stubborn D.I.Y. facilitation, and community-centered choreography. MK's dance training includes hybrid contemporary techniques that trace lineages to Street Styles, Postmodern dance, Euro-style floorwork practices, and Social Dancing.
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Their screendance work has been featured at film festivals around the U.S. including the ADF Movies by Movers, the Utah Dance Film Festival, BDF Informal Film Festival, ACDA Nationals, Cleveland Dance Festival, Third Coast Dance Film Festival, Experimental Series - Salt Lake City, Illinifest, and various concerts at the University of Maryland College-Park. Ford has assisted in cinematic direction, editing, or promotion for choreographers Brit Falcon, Gesel Mason, Vanessa Anspaugh, Kendra Portier, Sarah Marks Mininsohn, Mauriah Kraker + Leah Wilks, Tristan Koepke, Rebecca Steinberg, and Gerson Lanza.
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MK has performed with both choreographers and visual artists such as Abby Zbikowski + Momar Ndiaye, Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, Kendra Portier, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Maura Keefe, Brit Falcon, Rebecca Steinberg, Roxane D’orleans Juste, Jennifer Monson, Endalyn Taylor, Linda Lehovec, Renée Wadleigh + Nico Brown, Louisville’s Moving Collective company, and more.
Their choreographic work for the stage has been featured at various dance concerts at UMD, the Washington D.C. Choreographic Showcase, the Cleveland Dance Festival, the Chicago j e l l o series, Louisville Dance Series’ Hindsight, and more. Ford co-authored “Stock Motion Performances: Gestural Publics and Digital Intimacy” with Kate Ladenheim, Leo Grierson, and Timothy Kelley.
Ford's teaching experience spans across community workshops, studio classes, masterclasses, scientific studies, and collegiate courses. They teach contemporary dance techniques, introductory dance courses, screendance, dance theory courses, and yoga.
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Ford’s extended dance training has occurred through work-study and staff and fellow positions at American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, the Field Center (Faye Driscoll workshop), the New Dialect Summer Intensive, Countertechnique OBOC, STREB labs, and David Dorfman Dance Intensives. Ford also holds a 200-h E-RYT yoga certification and leads Hatha and Vinyasa practices, including specialty class techniques such as chair yoga, restorative yoga, and workshops on yoga anatomy, yogic philosophy, and creative languaging in yoga. Her freelance work includes dance documentation, video editing, archive, and social media support. Further, Ford has collaborated on projects such as the National Orchestral Institute Innovation Studio, web development, graphic design, visual art commissions, and animation commissions.