Kristen Smiarowski choreographs dance and dance-theater works for stage, site-specific venues and film. Her work has been presented in Southern California at the REDCAT/Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Highways Performance Space, Edgemar, UCLA, Center Stage Theater, and Loyola Marymount University and at festivals in New York, New Jersey and Maine. She has received commissions to create original choreography for the Skirball Cultural Center’s Siteworks Series and Dancing in the Streets’ Dances for Wave Hill. In 2004, she was commissioned by UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures to collaborate with filmmaker John Bishop on Becoming Glorya Kaufman Hall, a dance documentary about the history of UCLA’s Women’s Gymnasium.
In 2004, Smiarowski served as Rehearsal Director for Victoria Marks’ 1989 quartet, Dancing to Music, reconstructing the dance for Pittsburgh’s Dance Alloy, and for a cast of faculty and students from California State University, Long Beach. She was also Assistant Choreographer to Marks for The Father/Daughter Project (produced by DiverseWorks, Houston, TX, 2001) and the dance film Touch (2003).
Since 2002, Smiarowski has developed several choreographic/performative collaborations, in which she co-creates and performs in new work with other artists. Among these are the critically acclaimed duet, Attempts, which she created in 2002 with Tom Young, and several collaborations with Carmela Hermann, Stephanie Nugent and Peter Carpenter.
Smiarowski teaches in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at Loyola Marymount University. She has received two Dana Foundation Artist Fellowships from the Los Angeles Music Center Education Division (2003, 2005) and was an artist-in-residence at UCLA’s 2005 Hothouse Residency Program. She holds an M.F.A. in Dance (2002) from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. |