Kat Lin is a freelance dancer/choreographer based in the Bay Area. She’s been a featured artist with East Bay’s Performance Primers and shown work as a resident artist of Safehouse Arts. As a dancer, she has worked with Kinetech Arts on several shows over the past few years. 

Her choreography is an outlet for her curiosity - where she explores random topics - and an excuse to hang out with friends. She believes in letting curiosity guide her piece-making and is often inspired by scientific mechanics - whether it’s the double-slit experiment or telomere shortening. 

Her past/semi-present lives include being a wedding photographer and a freelance journalist, amongst other things.

Through the Studio 210 Residency, Kat will develop "the point," a new contemporary dance theater piece that contemplates one simple question—what is the point? Through movement and visual puns, this choreography is inspired by anything that misses or hits the point - the gesture of pointing, garden path sentences, pointe shoes, laser pointers, philosophy, mathematical points on a line, bullseye targets. We’ll pull from philosophy, math, pedestrian movement, and linguistics, and many other disciplines. The choreography unfolds as a series of vignettes, each offering glimpses into the elusive nature of meaning and understanding. The piece is all about the point of art—how we miss it, how we don't, and why we try to find it.

Photo of Kat Lin, Olesya Elfimova, Amber Gott by Erica Lin

Originally from Mexico City, Nico Ortiz Maimon is a queer Bay Area performer, choreographer, educator, and community organizer. She also works with children, performs drag, and plays drums in a punk band called gutfux. Nico has had the pleasure to work with Estrellx Supernova, Nina Haft, Bianca Cabrera, David Herrera, Christine Cali, Kim Ip, Eric Garcia, Cookie Harrist, and others. Her solo and collaborative film and live works have been supported by the QTBIPOC HIVE, PLATAFORMA, Joe Goode’s GUSH Fest, Queering Dance Festival (with Zoe Huey,) FRESH Festival exchange and others. An experimental improviser//alchemist at heart, their artistic journey revolves around joy as revolution, where love is the driving force. Through their creative endeavors, they aspire to address generational trauma, dismantle oppressive structures, and spark intentional and imaginative art-making. Nico's dedication to constructing systems beyond capitalism, coupled with their background in early childhood education, informs their commitment to nurturing environments of care and resilience within the dance community. Ultimately, Nico perceives her work as prefigurative queer activism, striving to construct a new world within the confines of the old.

Through the Studio 210 Residency, Nico Maimon (in collaboration with Kim Ip,) will begin to develop dance-theatre work, THIRTEEN, inspired by the 2013 film of the same name. Blending themes and aesthetics from the film with our own coming of age, we will explore themes of dark suburbia, mother-daughter complexities, substance abuse, and class divide. I hope to reveal the gut wrenching complexity of teenage girlhood, specifically as it is used as a tool for American assimilation.

Photo of Nico Maimon by Hillary Goidell