Chrissy Martin is an interdisciplinary performance artist and movement educator with roots in contemporary dance forms, Afro-Caribbean dance, postmodern experimental music, vocal jazz, and physical theater. Chrissy blends contemporary dance and language/voice to rigorously examine her intersecting queer and neurodivergent identities. Martin is an avid member of the global contact improvisation community and has studied with Nancy Stark Smith, KJ Holmes, Nita Little, Scott Wells and Kirstie Simpson. She has been a facilitator and leader of the Chicago Contact Improvisation Jam and has taught various CI workshops around the Midwest. She has performed with Sarasota Contemporary Dance, Muscle Memory Dance Theatre, Danielle Georgiou Dance Group, Dead White Zombies, BodyCompass Dance Projects, and Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape, and has performed works by Jeanine Durning, Jenna Riegel, and Jawole Jo Willa Zollar. Somatic practices such as Pilates, GYROTONIC® Expansion System, Body Mind Centering and Laban/Bartenieff Fundamentals inform Chrissy’s integrated movement style, and she is a certified Pilates and GYROTONIC® instructor.
Chrissy graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music with a focus on social praxis from New College of Florida in 2010 and completed her MFA in choreography and performance at Smith College in 2022. She has taught dance and somatics at Cleveland State University, Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University, as well as social dance and social emotional learning skills to public school students in the greater Chicago area. Her creative work has been nationally recognized by the American College Dance Association. She has produced independent dance/voice works at Links Hall and Hamlin Park in Chicago, Light Box in Detroit, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in Northampton, MA, and the Allen Theatre in Cleveland, OH.
Education
MFA, choreography and performance, Smith College
BA, music, New College of Florida