Katelyn Halpern is a multidisciplinary artist living in Jersey City, New Jersey.
Trained as a dancer and writer and self-taught in other media, she works in installations, performance, multimedia visual art, and the written word, and frequently constructs her work around the idea clusters of interiority-intimacy-reflection, strangeness-humor-freedom, peace-not peace-possibility-future, and the lived experience of moving through the world in a feminine body. Her works, formulated as worlds, versions, and networks, function as propositions about how things might, or ought, to be.
Major works include the evening length and multi-part danceworks JUICE, Loose Heart, and We Are Particles; installations Heartstrung, the Labyrinth for Reflection & the Generation of Love [No. 9], and disaster [place]; and the mail art project From Me To You, a year's worth of letters mailed to subscribers running 2021, 2023, and 2024. Most recently, she produced Reservoir, a poetry booklet about the Ashokan Reservoir in Upstate New York, and an origami fortune teller full of original haiku.
Her creative work has received support from a range of sources including the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Jersey (New!) Moves Fellowship, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship program (2023 Finalist in Choreography, 2024 Finalist in Interdisciplinary Art), the Exchange Place Alliance in Jersey City, chashama, the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, Arts On Site Residency & Retreat, and the 2017 Choreographers in Residence Program (CHIRP) at Jersey City’s County Prep High School. Her work has been performed and presented at venues including BAM Fisher (Brooklyn), NJPAC (Newark), White Eagle Hall (Jersey City), Deep Space Gallery (Jersey City), Under the Radar Festival (Omaha), Talento Bilingue (Houston), and Switchboard Presents (San Francisco).
She holds a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Dance from the University of Houston and a New Jersey teaching certificate for high school English. She is a 2012 Teach for America New Jersey corps member and is the owner and co-artistic director of SMUSH Gallery, an art space dedicated to creative and community work in Jersey City.
Learn more at katelynhalpern.com
Additional donations can be sent to Katelyn's Venmo at @Katelyn-Halpern
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