about me
I make work about the relationships between bodies and technology, the effects of our engagements with technical, social, and symbolic systems. I'm interested in how movement becomes mechanical—literally, how motion is captured and encoded into machines, and metaphorically, in how that encoding reflects larger systems of social control. Through performances and installations, I examine how choreography and technology create feedback loops that train bodies and define their expressive possibilities.
In my work, performers must negotiate with imposing technical systems in real time. This positions the moving body as an essential force within them—not just a user or input, but an active agent that reveals, with humor and vulnerability, how these systems work.
Relationships between bodies, screens, and machines are some of the most profound that exist, and they have a great deal of influence over the way people move through the world. They reveal a lot about ambition, effort, control, history, and agency. What humor or poetics or risks or tensions or delights emerge when machines poorly represent or misunderstand bodies and their expressive intentions?
My projects have been presented internationally, including at The Brown Arts Institute, Jacob's Pillow, National Sawdust, Media Art Xploration, DancePlace (DC), and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I was a member of the 2024 MAXmachina Lab cohort, as well as an Artist in Residence at the Barnard Movement Lab. My work has been celebrated in Dance Magazine as one of “25 to Watch” and “Best of 2018,” and I am currently supported by a 2025 Creative Capital Award and an LL Stewart Fellowship at PRAx.
explore my projects
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Gestural Publics
A two-part project that involves the creation of a dance performance and an online motion capture archive. It interrogates issues of identity, agency, and conformity in “stock” motion.
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COMMIT!
An interactive performance in which I fall hundreds of times in an hour, in a critique of societal pressures to demonstrate resilience, adaptability, and perfection.
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Monumental Death
An inflatable, robotic anti-monument that only inflates when audience members fall at its feet. The work considers the human cost of the heroic, monumental ideal.
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MarthaBot
Created alongside Xin Ying of the Martha Graham Dance Company, MarthBot is a custom large language model that responds to users in the voice and style of choreographer Martha Graham.
teaching
Currently, I’m an Assistant Professor of Choreography at UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. There, I teach choreography, dance and visual media, dance history and technology, and also offer boutique classes in motion capture, mixed reality performance making, and collaborative methods.
Previously, I taught at the University of Maryland, and have given workshops and master classes at ArtCenter College of Design, CalArts, NYU, Barnard, Columbia, the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, The Boston Conservatory, and The Juilliard School.
writing + recent publications
“The world, and thus worldview, presented by stock motions is one of sameness: standardized bodies tirelessly replicating standardized motions through digital worlds formed and decorated by standardized objects and materials. Such standardizing practices claim to be representative of the totality of the ‘real’ world, but in actuality represent no one; instead, they represent a fantasy (ideology) that people move with frictionless ease and regularity. This has political implications: that a “normal” body is compliant, controllable, and predictable.”
— Model Behavior, system:go
“Huang and Kurokawa continue this approach through a choreographic language that activates and responds to the expressive forms of characters. This philosophy also extends to machines: Huang disregards the assumed rigidity of the KUKA KR10 Cybertech robots, manipulating their movements with code he writes himself in KUKA’s native programming environment. Huang draws equivalence between the dancing human form, the dancing robotic form, and the expressive qualities of language, and does so through the one thing they all share: motion.”
— PillowNotes, Huang Yi’s Ink
“Babyface is blunt with its spectacle as a pathway to its own subversion. An essential motivating question throughout our process was: how do we get audiences past the initial moment of, “oh my god, it’s a robot on stage!” and therefore able to engage with our higher level concepts? Our answer was to fully embrace this moment. If we can first confront audiences with a familiar, predictable stereotype (robot barbie with segmented motion and a fixed smile), we can then reveal the shortcomings of that stereotype (the struggle against aesthetic restriction and the vulnerability that comes with being on display).”
— Frontiers in Robotics and AI
subscribe to my substack
This monthly newsletter is part process archive, part intellectual effort, part resource for like minded art/tech nerds — and the best way to make sure you know about my upcoming shows and events.
For curators interested in performance and technology, artists who are working with emerging technology or curious to begin, and academics seeking critical approaches to creative tech.
bios + cv
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Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer, educator, and creative technologist. They are an Assistant Professor of Choreography at UCLA and a recipient of the Google Artists + Machine Intelligence Faculty Research Award. Ladenheim was a member of the 2024 MAXmachina Lab cohort, as well as an Artist in Residence at the Robotics, Automation, & Dance (RAD) Lab and the Barnard Movement Lab. Their work has been presented internationally, including at the Brown Arts Institute, Jacob’s Pillow, National Sawdust, DancePlace (DC), and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Ladenheim was recognized in Dance Magazine's “25 to Watch” and “Best of 2018.” Their current project is supported by a 2025 Creative Capital Award.Description text goes here
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Kate Ladenheim is a choreographer, educator, and creative technologist whose artistic work and scholarship spans interactive installations, media design, performance, and robotics. Their practice investigates the interplay between social and technological systems, focusing on how bodies navigate, subvert, and are ultimately shaped by them.
Ladenheim is currently an Assistant Professor of Choreography at UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and a recipient of the Google Artists + Machine Intelligence Faculty Research Award. They were previously Artist in Residence in creative practice at the Maya Brin Institute for New Performance, a faculty role at the University of Maryland. Ladenheim holds an M.F.A. in Media Design Practices from ArtCenter College of Design, where they were also a postgraduate fellow. She conducted research in motion interfaces for robotics design at U.C.L.A., and was the 2019-2020 Artist in Residence at the Robotics, Automation, & Dance Lab at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
Ladenheim's projects have been presented internationally, including at The Brown Arts Institute, Jacob's Pillow, National Sawdust, Media Art Xploration, DancePlace (DC), and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They were a member of the 2024 MAXmachina Lab cohort, as well as an Artist in Residence at the Barnard Movement Lab. Their work has been celebrated in Dance Magazine as one of “25 to Watch” and “Best of 2018.” They are currently supported by a 2025 Creative Capital Award and an LL Stewart Fellowship at PRAx.
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