Caitlin Sikora
Artistic Director
Caitlin Sikora graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from University of California, Irvine with a BA in Dance and a BS in Physics with Honors. During her studies at UCI, she performed works by William Forsythe, Ohad Naharin, Lisa Naugle, and many others. She was honored with the award for Outstanding Undergraduate Research in Physics for her investigation of leptogenesis under the mentorship of Dr. Mu-Chun Chen. Sikora also designed and taught a seminar to UCI undergraduates on the Physics of Dance in the pilot year of the UTeach Program.
Sikora has danced professionally with Winifred Harris’s Between Lines Dance Company, Indah Walsh Dance Company, and Hannah Kahn Dance Company, where she also assisted in grantwriting and video marketing. She has worked with numerous independent choreographers such as Kate Sicchio, Anna Claire Brunelli, and Meredith Black. Her creative work has been featured in the Boulder International Fringe Festival, Warwick Summer Arts Festival, MIT’s Hacking Arts Festival, and SXSW. Sikora enjoyed two years on the faculty at Colorado Ballet, Parker Dance Academy, and International Ballet School, where she taught ballet and contemporary dance to a variety of ages and levels.
In 2015, Sikora completed her MFA in Dance at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. There, she performed works by Merce Cunningham, Cora Bos-Kroese, Lorena Delgado, and Mathew James Talaugon. She also received two interdepartmental grants to collaborate with students in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Following her studies at Tisch, Sikora was awarded a residency hosted by Danspace, where she investigated sensory perception and decision-making in choreography and improvisation.
In 2016, Sikora graduated from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering with an MS in Integrated Digital Media. In her tenure at Tandon, she worked with music and data artist Luke Dubois, as well as affective computing professor Win Burleson. She focused her research on classification of movement quality and haptic language development by way of studying computer science. Her collaboration on haptic wearable sports training devices led to her co-founding startup Remo Technologies, Inc, which received support from Verizon's Connected Futures Challenge and NYC Media Lab's Combine incubator. Sikora is currently working as a software engineer at Google. She continues to dance and choreograph as much as possible.
I have always been curious about decisions, how the chemical brain, the body, and outside forces interact to make a person think, feel, and behave a certain way. In my choreography, I search for improvisational structures that produce authentic and reliably intriguing choices. I play with mathematical systems to find those that emulate the spontaneity of nature. Working with the dancers to collect sensory data, I identify meaningful movements that are either emotionally familiar or physically surprising.
This is all motivated by my fascination with the simultaneous simplicity and overwhelming complexity of humanity. There are countless moving forces that interact in just the right way to create our lives as they are. Our actions are unexpectedly far-reaching, and while each one of us is unique and consequential, our behavioral patterns are easily modeled, predicted, and manipulated. My artistic work is a celebration of this duality and an investigation of how we conceive of ourselves within broader universal systems.
— CAITLIN SIKORA
