lauren kearns biography

June 30, 2011

“I am a contemporary choreographer emphasizing physical invention, expressive clarity, dynamic athleticism, and unexpected moments of intimacy. I weave mindful and full-bodied dancing, iconography, music, video, and visual design to create a rich, layered, and multi-sensory experience for the audience.”

Lauren Kearns is the artistic director and choreographer of the company. She has choreographed over forty-seven professionally produced concert pieces nationally and internationally. Kearns is starting off 2012 with performance engagements in New York City, Greensboro Fringe Festival and Auriallac France. She will be collaborating with artist Sallie DeEtte Mackie of Solid Revolution Photography on a portraiture and article about her choreographic work this coming summer. 

Kearns received the 2008 NC Dance Alliance Choreography Fellowship and has received over twenty-eight grants and fellowships to support her creative and scholarly research. She is a seasoned dance artist and somatic specialist having trained and worked with notable modern and post-modern artists including David Rousseve, Victoria Marks, Pat Catterson, Nancy Topf, and Erick Hawkins among many others. Kearns is also a dedicated yogini and is certified in Alignment-Based Yoga, Vinyasa Flow Yoga, and Classical Pilates. Her immersion in somatic modalities  greatly influences her movement vocabulary. Kearns most recently was selected for inclusion in the 2012 North Carolina Touring Artists Director. She has received two Elon Fund for Excellence Grants for her screendance and multimedia dance pieces and recently received a 2012 Elon summer fellowship to pursue her “Somatics in Action” research.

Prior to moving to North Carolina, Kearns was the artistic director of bodytalk dance, a Los Angeles repertory dance company that toured the southwest, had consecutive seasons at Highways Performance Space (a national performance network venue) and had a touring engagement in Changshu, China.

She holds her M.F.A. in Choreography and Performance, and an M.A. in Dance Education and Theory from UCLA. In addition to her choreography career she is a tenured Associate Professor of Dance and Head of the Dance Program at Elon University. She has published dance education articles on her somatic research and her multimedia work. Kearns is a frequent guest artist and lecturer at national and regional dance conferences.