Katherine Adamenko is a multi-disciplinary performing artist, teacher, director, writer, and producer. Her boundary-breaking interactive physical theater, performance art, and one-woman shows have been presented throughout the United States and Europe in theatres, galleries, festivals, conferences and site-specific locations.
Original full length works include the satirical cabaret performance art piece
The Story of a Phallus Woman, the multi-character, musical promenade work
Ladies Who Go Bump in the Night, and excerpts from the dramatic work-in-progress
For Her Own Good: Chronicles of Women and Madness. Other solo works include the fiber-optic
La Chanteuse d'Opera,
La Guapa Gorging Geisha,
The Red Light District of My Bathroom, The Altar of Ultimate Phallacy, CENSORED,
War Haikus/Haikus for War, Salome Jones, and
The Cheerleader and the Truth.
Venues and festivals include HOWL festival, Lower East Side Festival of the Arts, DUMBO Dance Festival, the Jackie Factory, Theater for the New City, Galapagos Art Space, the Slipper Room, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, Webster Hall, and the Wow Café Theatre in NYC, in San Francisco at Cellspace and the Museum of the Legion of Honor, and internationally at the Trinity Studios Gallery in Colchester, England and with Guillermo Gomez Peña at the Ceredigion Museum in Aberstwyth, Wales, and numerous site-specific locations.
As a professional actress, singer and dancer she has appeared in numerous regional and Off-Off Broadway productions including lead roles for playwrights Arthur Sainer and Mark Zagorin, in featured roles in musical theatre and dramatic productions at the historic Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan, and for Canadian filmmaker Albert Nerenberg.
Curatorial credits include the 2005 Lower East Side Festival of the Arts at Theater for the New City and the
Salon Series of Experimental Performance and Art at the University of California (UC) Davis. Katherine also served as Director of Exhibitions at the New York City Police Museum, where she curated one of New York City’s first permanent 9/11-related exhibitions, receiving national print and media recognition and a curatorial award of excellence from the Policewomen's Endowment Association.
As an arts educator, Katherine has taught creative movement and theater workshops throughout public schools in NYC for children and adults with special needs, teens and with the AIDS Theater Project and Jacques D’Amboise at the National Dance Institute. She also served as lecturer and workshop leader in the Departments of Theater and Dance and Environmental Design at UC, Davis.
Katherine has also been involved in numerous collaborations with fellow artists from around the world. Most recently, she is the co-founder of
Neuvo Butoh Harpa with electric harpist Mia Theodoratus, a Butoh dance -electric harp collective performing original works such as
Madman May and
Sickness in premiere venues across NYC.
Katherine currently performs and trains with the
Vangeline Theater (a post-Butoh company), most recently seen at PS122. She also is a member of the
Cilla Vee Movement Projects and performs throughout NYC in theatres and site-specific locations.
Awards include artistic residency at the Obie award-winning Theater for the New City, academic fellowship at the University of California (UC), Davis in the Department of Theatre and Dance, and recipient of production, lecture, and travel grants to develop artistic and academic work at UC, Davis and at the University of Essex in England.
She has studied with American Ballet Theatre, Joffrey Ballet, Paul Taylor Modern Dance Company, Gene Frankel Studio, HB Studios, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Bobby Baker, and Butoh masters Ko Murabushi and Akira Kasai. Her boundary-pushing physical performance poetry papers have also been presented at numerous academic conferences and have been published in both journal and anthology mediums. Katherine holds a BA in Modern Dance and Joint Political Science/History from Rutgers University and an MA in Contemporary Theatre Practice from the University of Essex in England.
