Kate Harpootlian is a director, choreographer, dancer, writer, and sometimes Spice Girl. Her career is held together by a love of movement and an even deeper love of telling stories with it.
Her career started as a professional dance auditioner, 80 percent being casting tapes she both would love to watch again and hopes will never see the light of day again. The other twenty percent was filled with credits such as Dancing with The Stars, So You Think You Can Dance, Jennifer Lopez, Carrie Underwood, Ariana Grande, Boardwalk Empire, In the Heights, Shaping Sound Dance Company, and for those who enjoy a soundscape of water being sloshed inside a seashell, Merce Cunningham's Inlets II.
Dance was always a stepping stone to her real obsession: storytelling through movement. As a choreographer, she was runner-up at the Capezio ACE Awards and premiered her work Better Late Than Never at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, later bringing it to Jacob's Pillow's Inside/Out Festival. Her choreography has been presented by Insitu Site Specific Festival, Houston Metropolitan Dance Company, the Martha Graham Next Wave Festival, Steps Performance Lab, Lindenwood University, and Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory. She also served as assistant choreographer on The Wrong Man at MCC Theater, and really hopes they make a cast album because the music was too good.
During the global pandemic she got bored and decided to get a BFA from The New School in film production which was great news for a recovering perfectionist who loves having more creativity and control. She also minored in screenwriting, allowing her to tell stories with words almost as easily as with gestures. Her short films have screened at Cinequest, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Indie Memphis, Portland Film Festival, and Dance Camera West, winning Best Experimental Short Film at the USA Film Festival, Best Art Direction at ASVOFF Paris, and the Jury's Stellar Award in Screen Dance at the Thomas Edison Film Festival. Her screenplays have been recognized by ISA and Cinequest as well.
She now combines all of it, directing and choreographing movement-led films, music videos, branded content, and fashion work that lives somewhere between cinematic precision and a healthy appetite for the strange. She celebrates beauty, stories that make you laugh and then feel bad for laughing, and anything weird yet also surprisingly poignant. You can also find her oversharing on Substack, which was probably inevitable.