BIO
Katherine Adamenko is a multi-disciplinary feminist performance artist, actress, butoh dancer, choreographer, and writer. Her boundary-breaking and interactive performances have been presented in theaters, festivals, galleries, museums, conferences, and site-specific locations throughout the United States and Europe. Her character-driven, body-based work often explores embodied emotions, gender roles, and the satirization of female beauty. She is excited to be performing at the second annual LatinX Performance Art Festival in Seattle later this year (2023), where she will present two putoh-inspired pieces. Putoh is a very special brand of performance art co-created by Katherine and artist Xavier Lopez (a co-founder of the festival) in 2001 while at grad school together. Putoh draws from Katherine’s Cuban/Hispanic heritage, Xavier’s Chicano heritage combined with a fervent post-punk sensibility, and traditional Japanese Butoh dance. You can read more about it here.
Throughout the Pandemic, Katherine was a member of the international Endlessly Performing Artists group, creating numerous performances for the camera. More recent festivals include Irondale’s On-Women Festival, the annual Lower East Side Festival of the Arts and Halloween Balls at Theater for the New City (celebrating 25+ years of association!), the UNFIX NYC Arts and Ecology Festival, and the international Butoh Breath Project. Katherine was one of 13 artists to perform at the 2019 New York Butoh Institute Festival produced by Vangeline Theatre and part of Butoh Next 10x10, a symposium to celebrate the publication of the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (in which she published an article).
As an entertainer and storyteller with three solo shows under her belt (Ladies Who Go Bump in the Night, The Story of a Phallus Woman, Escaping Biology), Katherine has created her brand of feminist "cabaret performance art" that fuses gender politics and satire with monologues, musical theatre, and dance in highly charged and often humorous character vignettes. Her fourth show, FOR HER OWN GOOD: Chronicles of Women and Madness, is a long-term passion project with a new excerpt being worked on this year!
As an artistic disrupter, Katherine enjoys turning traditional notions of spectatorship on its head by performing in non-traditional performance spaces and producing immersive and intimate audience experiences in such places as on the unsuspecting laps of academic conference-goers (Moving Bodies, Moving Boundaries) to her bathroom, closet, and a kitchen (Apartment Series).
As a ballerina, bodybuilder, and butoh dancer, Katherine uses this eclectic background to inform her ongoing dance works and site-specific movement installations. As a choreographer and improviser, she finds great joy in the kinesthetic interplay between muscle and music. She co-founded the experimental duo Neuvo Butoh Harpa with electric harpist Mia Theodoratus and has enjoyed relationships with Vangeline (Vangeline Theatre) and Claire Elizabeth Barrett (Cilla Vee Life Arts). Additionally, she has worked and collaborated with well-known international artists such as Pablo Helguera and Guillermo Gomez Pena, butoh master Diego Pinon, fine artist Julie Harvey, sculptor Sylvia Nagy and directors Gabriele Shafer and Nick Fracaro (International Culture Lab).
As a traditional actress, singer, and dancer, she has also appeared in numerous regional and Off-Off-Broadway productions and films with writers and directors Arthur Sainer, Isaak Esmail Isaak, Jack Ragotzy, Lissa Moira, Tom Wopat, and filmmaker Albert Neremberg.
Katherine has had performance residencies at the Obie award-winning Theater for the New City and Evolution Arts - City of Yonkers. She received a full teaching fellowship in Performance Studies from the Department of Theatre and Dance, University of California, Davis, and lecture and travel grants to develop artistic and academic work.
Select festivals include LES, Performa 11, HOWL, DUMBO Dance Festival, and the Coney Island Butoh Festival, LUMEN. Select NYC Venues include MOMA, Theater for the New City, Galapagos Art Space, HERE, Slipper Room, Webster Hall, Wow Café Theatre, BWAC, the Gershwin Hotel, and regionally at Cellspace, and the Museum of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco), Unicorn Theatre (Minneapolis), and internationally at the Lakeside Theatre and Trinity Studios Gallery (Colchester, UK) and the Ceredigion Museum in Aberystwyth, Wales, among many others.
With a love for the lip-smacking language of poetry, Katherine has presented boundary-pushing poetic papers at international conferences that have also been published in journal and book form. She has performed her original performance poetry and poems throughout NYC and London and is the author of a written collection (Madness Unique to those who Call Themselves Atheists).
Katherine possesses a deep love of teaching, first as a creative movement teacher for at-risk and special needs children, teens, and adults (NYC Board of Education, Brooklyn Boy's Town, National Dance Institute) and later as a performance studies lecturer and workshop leader (Departments of Theater and Dance and Environmental Design, UC, Davis). Her most profound teaching experience was as an arts educator with the AIDS Theater Project during the throes of the AIDS epidemic in NYC.
Katherine dedicates her work to the remarkable institutions and teachers that influence her work to this day. Among them are - Ballet: Patricia Wilde and Nancy Clemens (American Ballet Theatre). Modern: Paul Taylor and Jose Limon company members, Martita Goshen, Claudia Gittelman. Butoh: Diego Piñon, Tetsuro Fukahara, Akira Kasai, Ko Murobushi, Vangeline. Acting US: Gene Frankel, Anthony Grasso. Acting UK: Jean Marlow, Mike Alfreds, Zofia Kalinska, Irina Brown. Mime: Paul Curtis. Performance Art: Bobby Baker, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Les Waters. Voice: Steve Sweetland. Dialect: Julia Wilson-Dixon.
Additionally, she is a fitness and well-being expert, having harnessed her passion for movement and teaching as a yoga instructor, personal trainer, group fitness instructor, wellness coach, and amateur bodybuilding champion. She has helped to build award-winning well-being programs for major corporations such as Ascena Retail, Dressbarn, American Express, Ropes & Gray, LLP, and Gympass. She’s written for and appeared in numerous fitness and wellness blogs and magazines, such as Charity Miles, Ace Fitness, and Bloomberg Law. You can learn more about her career here.
Katherine holds a BA in Modern Dance and Joint Political Science/History from Rutgers University and an MA in Contemporary Theatre Practice (with Distinction) from the University of Essex in England.