KT Niehoff, Artistic Director
KT Niehoff
Artistic Director of Lingo
KT Niehoff was named the 2007 dance Artist of the Year by Seattle Magazine. She was also featured in Dance Magazine’s April ’08 issue, “International Women in Dance.” She is the recipient of three Seattle Arts Commission Individual Artist awards, a 2001 Seattle Artist Trust Fellow and a 2006 Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. She holds a BFA from New York University.
Since 1998, the major platform for her work has been with her company of collaborating artists, Lingo, with which she has created five full-length dance theater works and numerous short works. As of late, her curiosities surround shifting the entry point of how the public interfaces with dance. She is interested in environments outside the limitations of proscenium-based performance, such as art “events” including food, drink, gathering and dancing, museum installations, film work and one on one encounters in urban, public settings.
As a teacher, Niehoff has taught contemporary technique and her composition system called Reinvent Your Eye / Tools for Abstract Composition world wide at institutions including The SNDO (Amsterdam), Oberlin College (Ohio), Estudio 3 (Madrid), The Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts, Cornish College of the Arts (Seattle) and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Professional company commissions include Spectrum Dance Theater in Seattle (Donald Byrd, A.D.), Groundworks Dance Company in Cleveland (David Shimotakahara, A.D.) and the d-9 Dance Collective in Seattle.
As an administrator, Niehoff was the co-founder and director of Velocity Dance Center from 1996-2006, and has sat on artistic panels for the National Endowment for the Arts (2005) and USArtists International (2008). In 2002, Niehoff was an invited artist delegate to the think-tank retreat at White Oak that was sponsored by the Doris Duke Foundation. Her work there helped laid the platform for the Pacific Northwest Regional Dance Lab that took place in late summer 2004 in Seattle.
Currently, KT is editing her first short film titled Parts Don’t Work, shot on location at the Fun Forest in the Seattle Center with support from Northwest Film Forum and 4culture. She is also working on a three-month performance art piece called A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light, commissioned by ACT Theatre’s Central Heating Lab residency program and presented by ACT and the Seattle Art Museum. Events will happen in multiple locations throughout the city between March-May 2010.
“Niehoff has made a couple of small, tight works this year. Both are kinetically evocative and even more powerful for the clear boundaries she places on the material and performance. In an interview before the 2005 Relatively Real, Niehoff wondered if dance could actually do everything she wanted to accomplish as an artist. If she continues in the vein, the answer is a resounding yes.”
–Sandra Kurtz, Seattle Weekly, March 2006