Kimberly Bartosik
(NY)
2026
- Bartosik is a choreographer, performer, educator, and writer. She is a 2026-27 Visiting Scholar at Center for Ballet & the Arts; a 2024 National Dance Project Production Grant (NDP) recipient from New England Foundation for the Arts; a 2025 New York State Council on the Arts/NYSCA Support for Artists Award grantee; and a 2025 Harkness Foundation for Dance Project Grant recipient. Other recent awards include: the Doris Duke Foundation Performing Artist Recovery Fund in the New York Community Trust; Bessie Award Honoree for Outstanding Production; Ragdale Foundation Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; Virginia B. Toulmin Women Leaders in Dance Fellowship at Center for Ballet and the Arts.
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Bartosik’s work has been commissioned and presented by BAM Next Wave, L’Alliance New York, Crossing the Line Festival, New York Live Arts, Bates Dance Festival, Torn Space Theater, American Dance Festival, LUMBERYARD, American Realness, Abrons Art Center, Gibney, Danspace Project, The Kitchen, La Mama, and others. She has toured to Supersense: Festival of the Ecstatic (Melbourne, Australia), Bratislava in Movement (Slovakia), Museum of Contemporary Art/MCA Chicago, American Dance Festival, MASS MoCA/Jacob’s Pillow, Walker Arts Center (2027), PS 21 The Dark Festival (2027), Wexner Arts Center, Dance Place, The Yard, FlynnSpace, Bates Dance Festival, Columbia College, Centre Chorégraphique National de Franche-Comté à Belfort, Festival Rencontres Chorégraphique Internationales de Seine-Saint Denis, Artdanthe Festival, Church, Mount Tremper Arts, and others.
Her work has also been supported by National Dance Project (NDP) Production & Touring Grant and Community Engagement Fund from New England Foundation for the Arts; MAP Fund; Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography/ MANCC; FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance); Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, USArtists International; Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grants to Artists and Emergency Grants; Jerome Foundation; and others. Bartosik was an inaugural participant in the 2024 International Choreographers Retreat, organized by Montréal Danse and c.a.t.a.m.o.n Dance Group. As a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 9 years, Bartosik received a Bessie Award for Exceptional Artistry.
blood anchor
Visiting Artist | September 27 – October 10 , 2026
Collaborators in Residence: Rachel Gill, Jacoby Pruitt, Donavon Reed [Performers], Iréne Hultman [Dramaturg], Roderick Murray [Lighting Designer]
Bartosik will come to MANCC for the first time to further the development of her new work blood anchor. During this early stage residency at MANCC, Bartosik, in collaboration with her three performers, will delve into the work’s dense movement vocabulary to reveal its emotional core. She will also explore design elements with artist Roderick Murray and deepen her understanding of the themes driving the work with dramaturg Irene Hultman. Rachel Gill’s role in this process is being created in collaboration with Ashley Merker.
Blood stains. It nourishes, and, if contaminated, can kill. Giving blood is sharing, often saving, life. Sharing blood is one of the most profound and complex human connections. Blood relatives give us a sense of lineage and belonging, of knowing we are not alone because someone in the world shares our DNA. But there are times when its liquid nature fails to have the power to bind and anchor us. When we lose connection, the feeling can be that of a severed limb or lost body part. From this “exit wound*”, blood (metaphorically) drips, flows, and leaves a trail. It’s a sign of pain but also a path for someone to find you.
blood anchor is a deeply physical, emotionally visceral choreographic work for three performers inspired by the complex power of blood relations and the epidemic of loneliness that has engulfed our culture. The work peers deeply into cracks that have formed in so many familial relationships within this decade of political polarization, and ways the tenacity of blood connection is being challenged long term. Structured as a series of interior maps anchored to moments (personal and global) of connection and fracture, blood anchor also draws from the film Sirāt by Oliver Lax which tracks a father’s unrelenting search through an unforgiving landscape for a lost child.
In Arabic, Sirāt translates to the razor thin bridge suspended between two worlds- heaven and hell. In blood anchor that fragile path is the link between actual lives that are connected through a wound, a scar, a blood line. Following threads of DNA, history, fate – what we can control (our personal pathways) and what we, mostly, cannot (when we depart from this existence) – blood anchor peels apart layers of grief, hope, empathy, and forgiveness that urge us towards or tear us from those who share our blood. The work illuminates the existential loneliness we can encounter when that connection is broken-either willfully or from forces in our greater world.
Referencing images and rhythms of desert storms – from relentless heat to blinding wind to the inviting swells of shifting sand – the process of creating blood anchor involves building cycles of physical material and emotional states that re-navigate depending on the specific pathway of each performer. It asks how we find our way back to each other when the path is neither linear nor visible. Like remnants left in the sand from a volatile high wind, what do we leave for others to discover and piece back together? How can the ways that blood connects be encountered as a beautiful blemish, a mark of the untidiness of this unique love?
*“exit wound” is a phrase borrowed from poet Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds