BIO

Katherine Adamenko is an American multidisciplinary artist working across performance art, theatre, dance, media, visual art, installation, research, education, and curation. Her boundary-breaking and interactive movement, theatre, installations, videos, and text-based works have been presented on stages, at festivals, galleries, museums, conferences, and site-specific locations throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, including MoMA, Performa 11, and Theater for the New City in New York City, and Cité-des-Hospitalières in Montreal. Her character-driven, body-based work draws on cultural and historical research, writing, movement-based exploration, site-specific practices, and audience interaction to generate material for performance, while treating the process of making and documenting performance as visual art in its own right.

RECENT WORK

Katherine is currently creating BUTOH FAMILIA, a performance and research project exploring embodied ancestry through butoh dance. She is the recipient of a 2026 LARAC Independent Artist Grant in support of the project’s first work, Waves of the Sea, premiering in Glens Falls, NY, in November 2026.

Most recently, Katherine created and curated the 2026 Adirondack Butoh Summit at Salem Art Works’ Carey Hill Sculpture Park in Salem, New York, a weekend residency bringing together artists from the Adirondacks, New York City, and Montreal for movement research, collaboration, and experimentation. Presented by Katherine’s House of Ladypants, a center for experimental performance and creative collaboration, including two works with multidisciplinary artist, percussionist, vocalist, and dancer Paula Jeanine Bennett. The Summit was conceived as an exploratory next chapter following the 2025 debut of the Adirondack Butoh Dance Festival.

That festival began when Katherine created, curated, and performed in the inaugural Adirondack Butoh Dance Festival, a House of Ladypants event staged in the quarry grounds of the historic Quarry House in Glens Falls, NY. Conceived to bring new and experimental performance forms to the region, it brought together butoh artists from Montreal, New York City, and the Adirondacks. Katherine also performed in her third collaboration with Montreal-based butoh artist and somatic educator Speranza Spir of SPY&DNY, as the performance duo Les Sœurs Cygnes (The Swan Sisters).

Most recently, Katherine performed with collaborator Speranza Spir as part of It's Gonna Be Noir evening of improvisational music and dance at the converted Chapelle de la Cité-des-Hospitalières cathedral in Montreal in a work entitled "Le Versement Des Sœurs Cygnes" (The Pouring of the Swan Sisters), their second collaboration.

Additional recent performances include Le Versement des Sœurs Cygnes (The Pouring of the Swan Sisters) with collaborator Speranza Spir at the 2024 It’s Gonna Be Noir festival, held at the Chapelle de la Cité-des-Hospitalières in Montreal, and headlining the 2023 2nd International LatinX Performance Art Festival in Seattle, where Katherine presented putoh-inspired works Shocked, an excerpt from her long-term project For Her Own Good: Chronicles of Women and Madness, Tres Chic: The Beauty Borg Full Circle, and The Soft Cyborg Meets the Beauty Borg with contemporary artist, festival founder, and co-creator of putoh Xavier Lopez.

From 2020–2023, Katherine expanded her performance-for-camera practice as a member of the international Endlessly Performing Arts group and Butoh Breath Project led by artist and educator, Marco Nektan, Irondale’s On-Women Festival, and the UNFIX NYC Arts and Ecology Festival, creating and self-filming numerous works and collaborating virtually with artists internationally, culminating in a collaboration for the It’s Gonna Be Hot festival in Serbia. This work grew out of earlier experiments with site-specific performance and video, including Magic Touch from For Her Own Good: Chronicles of Women and Madness mutlipedia passion project, Bathtub Reminiscence, and the video project EYEWORKS.

In 2019, Katherine was one of 13 artists selected to perform at Vangeline Theatre’s New York Butoh Institute Festival, where she premiered Tres Chic: The Beauty Borg. That same year, she collaborated with New Zealand artist Miki Seifert at Butoh Next 10x10, a symposium marking the publication of the Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance, edited by Bruce Baird and Rosemary Candelario, to which Katherine contributed an article.

AS AN ENTERTAINER & STORYTELLER…

With three original written and performed 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 through highly charged, often humorous character work.

AS AN ARTISTIC DISRUPTER…

Katherine turns traditional notions of spectatorship on their head through intimate and immersive performance, from the unsuspecting laps of academic conference-goers to her bathroom, closet, and kitchen. Her site-responsive work has taken shape in galleries, historic and deteriorated structures, sculpture parks, natural landscapes, and other non-traditional spaces, often responding directly to the architecture, objects, and environment around her.

AS A BALLERINA, BODYBUILDER, AND BUTOH DANCER…

Years of rigorous studio training across these distinct disciplines have given Katherine a deep reservoir of physical knowledge, shaped through repetition, experimentation, and embodied learning. The studio has long functioned as a laboratory for her practice, where movement, sensation, discipline, and inquiry become material for performance and practice-as-research. Her approach is further informed by artists and educators including Pina Bausch, Margaret H’Doubler, Rudolph Laban/Labanotation.

AS AN ACADEMIC ARTIST…

From international conferences and performative papers to journal and book publications and artistic recognition in prominent publications, Katherine has long moved between artistic practice, scholarship, and teaching. Her academic path includes a hybrid, practice-based MA and thesis, followed by a full teaching fellowship and an intensive year of doctoral study marked by teaching, conference presentations, publication, curatorial work, and funded research activity.

AS A TEACHING ARTIST

Katherine has taught creative movement and theatre practices in public schools, community centers, universities, and arts organizations, working with children, teens, and adults, including at-risk and special needs populations. Early formative experiences included serving as a teaching assistant to Jacques d’Amboise at the National Dance Institute and working as an arts educator with the AIDS Theater Project during the height of the AIDS epidemic in NYC.

AS A TRAINED ACTRESS, SINGER, AND DANCER

Katherine has appeared in numerous regional and Off-Off-Broadway productions, musicals, and on film, bringing a substantial performance background into her broader experimental practice.

Her training spans renowned dancers, actors, directors, playwrights, filmmakers, and performance artists, including Patricia Wilde, Dorothy Lister, Gene Frankel, Albert Nerenberg, Paul Curtis, Arthur Sainer, Tom Wopat, Bobby Baker, Zofia Kalinska, Mike Alfreds, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ko Murobushi, Katsura Kan, and Diego Piñón, among others; and institutions including HB Studio, the Actors Centre London, Japan Society, Bern Theatre, and the historic Barn Theatre in Augusta, Michigan.

EMBODIMENT BEYOND THE STAGE

For the past 20 years, Katherine’s full-time work has extended her relationship with the body beyond the stage, first in the fitness industry as a Tier 3 Personal Trainer and Master Instructor at Equinox Fitness and EFTI, and later through a career in corporate well-being. She has served as a workplace well-being subject matter expert across global legal, SaaS, financial services, wellness, and retail organizations. As part of this work, she has been a group fitness and yoga instructor, wellness coach, mindfulness facilitator, presenter, and practitioner, grounded in her extensive study and practical application of positive psychology.

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. She later completed one year of doctoral study in Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis, supported by a full teaching fellowship