Katie Ballard is a lifelong mover, creator, and educator from Winston Salem, North Carolina. Katie graduated Summa Cum Laude from Appalachian State University with a BA in Dance Studies and a minor in Somatic Sustainability. She has been a dance instructor from a young age, working across multiple communities in North Carolina to foster dance connections in young lives. She is passionate about accessibility within the arts and previously served as the director of Anyone Can Dance, a pay-what-you-can dance program. Katie working on her MFA in Dance with a concentration in Choreography while working as a Graduate Teaching Associate in the School of Dance at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. In her current work, she aims to challenge the notion of what separates archival research and movement development by bringing the written work of those who came before her into conversation with her embodied archive.