Bio
Catherine Galasso creates live performance at the intersection of theater, dance, and installation. Since 2006 she has created eight evening-length, cross-disciplinary, cast-specific works and numerous shorter performances for dance venues, galleries, and museums. Sources of inspiration include the man with the Guinness record for being struck by lightning seven times, French cinema pioneers the Lumière Brothers, and Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. Galasso’s work has been presented by Danspace Project, La MaMa, the River To River Festival, Joyce SoHo, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Bibliotheque National in Paris, Harvard University’s Carpenter Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and the International Theater Festival in Pristina, Kosovo. Galasso has been awarded mentorships with Monica Bill Barnes, Wally Cardona, and Ralph Lemon, and residencies at The Watermill Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Kaatsbaan International Dance Center, Chez Bushwick, ODC Theater (San Francisco), and ZonaD Studio (Bucharest).
While based in San Francisco from 2006-2010, Galasso was offered a three-year residency at ODC Theater and received evening-length commissions from the San Francisco Film Society and the San Francisco Foundation. Her ODC Theater commissioned Bring On The Lumière! (2011) toured to Joyce SoHo and Cornell University, was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award, and is featured in the 2016 Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Her first evening-length presentation in New York, Show Me The Money (2009), was created for a former Wall Street bank vault through a Swing Space Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Galasso’s recent projects include: the revival of Jim Neu’s experimental musical comedy The Floatones at La MaMa, Fall of the Rebel Angels: X at River To River, and notes on degroat at Danspace Project.
Featuring a cast of contemporary downtown superstars (Jess Barbagallo, Joshua William Gelb, Larissa Velez-Jackson and Greg Zuccolo) The Floatones ran for two weeks to sold-out houses, was named a New York Times “Critics’ Pick”, and was described by Alexis Soloski as “very nearly unclassifiable and utterly delightful” (May 2015).
Galasso’s 10th and final iteration X of her multi-chaptered work, Fall of the Rebel Angels, premiered at the River To River Festival in June 2015. The work took place in a vacant 19th century landmarked house on Governors Island, unfolding in 3 acts from the front lawn, to the parlor, to multiple rooms on the upper floors.
In December 2015 she premiered her Danspace-commissioned notes on de groat, which evolved from the reconstruction of early works by Andy de Groat, an American choreographer based in France. notes was part of GET DANCING, a 75-minute program conceived by Galasso in which she re-staged dances by de Groat with him advising from afar. get dancing engaged a living history that was both personal and part of a legacy of downtown performance, bringing together generations of performers, including original cast members. GET DANCING was nominated for a ‘Bessie’ Award for Outstanding Revival.
Galasso was a recent Resident Artist with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Dance Development Program (2015-2017) created by LMCC President Sam Miller, and is a current 2016-2018 Artist-in-Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Born in New York and raised in Italy, she is the daughter of internationally acclaimed composer Michael Galasso. She received a painting degree from the Art Institute in Venice, Italy, and holds a BA in Film from Cornell University.
She has been a guest teaching artist at MassArt, Cornell University, and UC Berkeley, and has created work on students at the University of San Francisco. She has also led movement workshops for underserved youth and adults in rehabilitation through the Odyssey and Phoenix houses. Galasso has worked as a choreographic assistant to Annie-B Parson, and an assistant director and performer with Yoshiko Chuma/School of Hard Knocks. Since 2012 Galasso has worked as a part time Media & Communications Manager at Movement Research, a 40 year-old New York-based non-profit service organization dedicated to the “investigation of dance and movement-based forms.”
She is currently developing a multi-chapter performance work entitled Of Iron and Diamonds based on Boccaccio’s 14th century collection of novellas The Decameron. The cast includes a range of performers of different backgrounds and body-types, including a portly 65-year old Frank Conversano, and Galasso’s infant son, Atlas Green. The next chapters will premier in downtown NYC in June 2018 and at ODC Theater in San Francisco in December 2018.
While based in San Francisco from 2006-2010, Galasso was offered a three-year residency at ODC Theater and received evening-length commissions from the San Francisco Film Society and the San Francisco Foundation. Her ODC Theater commissioned Bring On The Lumière! (2011) toured to Joyce SoHo and Cornell University, was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award, and is featured in the 2016 Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Her first evening-length presentation in New York, Show Me The Money (2009), was created for a former Wall Street bank vault through a Swing Space Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.
Galasso’s recent projects include: the revival of Jim Neu’s experimental musical comedy The Floatones at La MaMa, Fall of the Rebel Angels: X at River To River, and notes on degroat at Danspace Project.
Featuring a cast of contemporary downtown superstars (Jess Barbagallo, Joshua William Gelb, Larissa Velez-Jackson and Greg Zuccolo) The Floatones ran for two weeks to sold-out houses, was named a New York Times “Critics’ Pick”, and was described by Alexis Soloski as “very nearly unclassifiable and utterly delightful” (May 2015).
Galasso’s 10th and final iteration X of her multi-chaptered work, Fall of the Rebel Angels, premiered at the River To River Festival in June 2015. The work took place in a vacant 19th century landmarked house on Governors Island, unfolding in 3 acts from the front lawn, to the parlor, to multiple rooms on the upper floors.
In December 2015 she premiered her Danspace-commissioned notes on de groat, which evolved from the reconstruction of early works by Andy de Groat, an American choreographer based in France. notes was part of GET DANCING, a 75-minute program conceived by Galasso in which she re-staged dances by de Groat with him advising from afar. get dancing engaged a living history that was both personal and part of a legacy of downtown performance, bringing together generations of performers, including original cast members. GET DANCING was nominated for a ‘Bessie’ Award for Outstanding Revival.
Galasso was a recent Resident Artist with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Dance Development Program (2015-2017) created by LMCC President Sam Miller, and is a current 2016-2018 Artist-in-Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Born in New York and raised in Italy, she is the daughter of internationally acclaimed composer Michael Galasso. She received a painting degree from the Art Institute in Venice, Italy, and holds a BA in Film from Cornell University.
She has been a guest teaching artist at MassArt, Cornell University, and UC Berkeley, and has created work on students at the University of San Francisco. She has also led movement workshops for underserved youth and adults in rehabilitation through the Odyssey and Phoenix houses. Galasso has worked as a choreographic assistant to Annie-B Parson, and an assistant director and performer with Yoshiko Chuma/School of Hard Knocks. Since 2012 Galasso has worked as a part time Media & Communications Manager at Movement Research, a 40 year-old New York-based non-profit service organization dedicated to the “investigation of dance and movement-based forms.”
She is currently developing a multi-chapter performance work entitled Of Iron and Diamonds based on Boccaccio’s 14th century collection of novellas The Decameron. The cast includes a range of performers of different backgrounds and body-types, including a portly 65-year old Frank Conversano, and Galasso’s infant son, Atlas Green. The next chapters will premier in downtown NYC in June 2018 and at ODC Theater in San Francisco in December 2018.
