Dr Katrina McPherson is a director and award-winning screendance artist, whose creative, scholarly, and educational work is at the forefront of the international field.
Having gained her BA (Hons) Dance Theatre at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, an early career fascination with the collaborative possibilities of dance and the moving image led Katrina to a postgraduate in video art at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland. This laid the foundations of what would become a life-long, multi-faceted and influential engagement with dance on screen.
Over the 30 plus years since, Katrina has collaborated with numerous international artists, including Sang Jijia (China/Tibet), Crystal Pite (Canada), Marc Brew (UK/US), Simon Ellis (NZ/UK), Harold Rheaume (Quebec), and Kirstie Simson (UK/US). The resulting films and installations have been presented at festivals, on television, in galleries and venues. Katrina has received funding from public and private organisations, institutions, and arts councils. In 2002, she won the individual artist Creative Scotland Award, in 2020 was recognised by a Career Achievement Award from Dance Camera West Festival in Los Angeles and an Honorary Award from Choreoscope Dance Film Festival, Barcelona in 2022. Several works that Katrina directed are held in collections, including Lux Artists’ Moving Image UK, Routledge’s on-line Performance Archive and the British Council.
Katrina also had a 15-year career as a television director, making arts programmes for the BBC, Channel Four and ITV. A much sought-after lecturer, workshop facilitator and mentor, Katrina teaches screendance world-wide. She is Visiting Lecturer at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick, Ireland and was until recently, she was Director of the graduate and undergraduate screendance programmes at the University of Utah, USA.
Katrina is the author of Making Video Dance, a step-by-step guide to creating dance for the screen, first published by Routledge in 2006, with a new edition released in 2018. She is a founder member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Screendance.
Instagram: katrinacmphersonart.
Facebook: Katrina McPherson
Making Video Dance