About Kate
I was born in Washington, DC and grew up in Arlington, VA where I attended St. Agnes Elementary School and Bishop O’Connell High School.
I later moved to Charlottesville, VA to attend the University of Virginia where I got a bachelor’s degree in cognitive science, concentrating in computer science and neuroscience.
I worked as a teaching assistant and research assistant in the Levy Lab (Neural Networks) and as a research assistant in the Kubovy Lab (Perception), where I did research with Martin van den Berg on the perceptual phenomenon called synesthesia (Journal of Vision abstract and UVA’s Arts & Sciences article).
After graduation, I moved to Salamanca in Spain for 4 months to study Spanish at the Universidad de Salamanca and flamenco dancing.
When I returned, I lived in Charlottesville, VA for nearly 3 years while working at The Rimm-Kaufman Group in paid search advertising and search engine optimization. At that time I developed an interest in web design and usability.
I subsequently went to live in Limerick, Ireland, where I was a postgraduate student at the University of Limerick in the Irish World Academy of Music & Dance. I completed an MA degree in Irish Traditional Dance Performance. I also became a member of Dance Research Forum Ireland, which is an inter-disciplinary society for the scholarship of dance in Ireland.
I have been practicing Irish step dancing for 18 years since starting with the O’Neill-James School of Irish Dancing and I practiced and taught with Carmel O’Rourke-Tighe in Charlottesville. I also plan to sit the TCRG exams to earn certification to teach Irish dance in An Coímísíun le Ríncí Gaelacha in the future.
I am currently living in Chico, CA, where I spend my days working as a web developer at Auctiva Corporation. I am interested in writing clean, standards-compliant XHTML and CSS, and I am learning jQuery and other Javascript libraries.
My free time is spent Irish dancing with the Maria Oliver Academy of Irish Dance, hip-hop and jazz dancing in the Full Force Dance Company (C-Force team) at Chico Creek Dance Centre, and practicing capoeira with Grupo Capoeira Malês. I also practice vinyasa and Ashtanga styles of yoga, which I started at the highly recommended Studio 206 on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, VA.
In 2008 I presented at the 7th Annual National Conference of the American Synesthesia Association in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I performed a solo dance entitled “Color Play,” choreographed as part of my MA work at the University of Limerick. This choreography is the beginning of what I hope will become future research exploring synesthesia in art, synesthesia in dance, the language of dance, and dance perception and cognition.
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