Caitlin Sikora
Artistic Director
Caitlin Sikora is a life-long dancer, performer, and choreographer. Having begun her dance training as a toddler, she holds a BA in dance from UC Irvine and an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. During her studies, she performed works by William Forsythe, Ohad Naharin, Merce Cunningham, Shen Wei, and Cora Bos-Kroese. In her choreography studies at Tisch, she was awarded two Tisch Interdepartmental Collaboration grants and a creative research residency hosted by Danspace.
Sikora has danced professionally with Hannah Kahn Dance Company, Winifred Harris’s Between Lines Dance Company, and Indah Walsh Dance Company. She has also worked with numerous independent choreographers such as Kate Sicchio 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. In NYC, her choreography has been performed at Gibney's Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center in a split bill with Summation Dance Company, Green Space as part of their D.I.G. Artist Residency, Theatre for the New City, and now CPR – Center for Performance Research.
In addition to being a highly accomplished technical dancer, Sikora has always held a deep interest in math, physics, and philosophy. Alongside her Dance degree, Sikora earned a BS in Physics from UC Irvine, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was presented the Outstanding Undergraduate Research in Physics award for her investigation of leptogenesis under Dr. Mu-Chun Chen. Merging her fields of study, Sikora developed and taught an undergraduate seminar on the Physics of Dance during the pilot year of UCI's UTeach program.
After collaborating with digital media artists as an MFA student, Sikora became interested in Computer Science and earned an MS in Integrated Digital Media with a focus on Human-Computer Interaction from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. In her tenure at Tandon, she worked with music and data artist Luke Dubois, as well as Dance and Technology pioneer Kate Sicchio and Affective Computing professor Win Burleson. Her collaboration with Industrial Designers from Pratt on haptic wearable sports training devices led to research grants from Verizon's Connected Futures Challenge and NYC Media Lab's Combine Incubator.
Alongside her work in dance, Sikora is completing her eighth year as a software engineer at Google, where her work has taken the form of multi-device perception systems, human motion understanding, and AI assistants. She has contributed publications in Affective Computing and AI efficiency, and her recent work on visual outputs for video-based AI assistants resulted in her first patent.
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
