Sam Kim is an experimental choreographer, dancer and teacher who has been making and performing in dances for over two decades. She is a second-generation immigrant of Korean descent, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Born of compulsion and curiosity, her body of work inquires into the very nature of what dance is. Her dances restlessly investigate the margins of dance, valuing the edges, while courting the danger inherent in rejecting dance’s legacies––in other words, her choreographic practice is a means of deeply engaging in a personal game of brinkmanship.
Significant, commissioned works include Other Animal (Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 2019), Procession (The Cowles Center, Minneapolis, 2018), Fear in Porcelain (The Chocolate Factory Theater, 2016), Angle of Incidence (The Cowles Center, Minneapolis, 2016), Sister to a Fiend (Gibney Dance, 2015), Some Kind of Derelict Telekinesis (Barnard/Columbia Dances at New York Live Arts, 2014), Darling (Performance Space 122, 2009), dumb dumb bunny (The Kitchen, 2007), Cult (Dance Theater Workshop, 2007), AVATAR (Mulberry St Theater, 2006), Nobody Understands Me (Dance Theater Workshop, 2004), Placid Baby (Performance Space 122, 2003) and Valentine (Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 2002).
Additionally, Sam’s work has been presented by the Brooklyn Museum, Galapagos Art and Performance Space, JACK, Movement Research, Highways Performance Space, Studio 303, and the Unknown Theater, among others.
Sam looks forward to the premiere of her latest work, The Fall, at The Chocolate Factory Theater in 2025. Driven by physics and brute force, The Fall will be a subversively brash, elegant-stupid, feminist dance, performed by a group of primarily AAPI performers. Inspired by her recent works, Procession and Angle of Incidence, as well as American Ninja Warrior and The Olympics, The Fall will traffic in high-stakes athletic action and scrutiny to make visible the shape and force of human will. Sam’s work has been frequently reviewed and written about in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, The Star Tribune (Minneapolis), and is the subject of an essay in the book Contemporary Directions in Asian American Dance, edited by Yutian Wong, and published by The University of Wisconsin Press, among others.
Sam has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, Swoon Art House, Mount Tremper Arts, The Bogliasco Foundation, Movement Research, New York Live Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and MacDowell, among others, in support of her work.
Sam has long provided service to the field––the NYC dance community, as well as the national and international dance community, through various leadership and teaching channels. She organized and moderated the feminist Movement Research Studies Project Band of Outsiders: WOMEN (2016). She also served on the board of Dance Theater Workshop (2006-2010), and was a member of the Artist Advisory Committee at Performance Space 122 (1999-2003). In 2022, she was invited to go to Belgrade, Serbia as a GPS Artist (Global Practice Sharing program of Movement Research), funded by the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
