Kate Spanos, Ph.D., is a dancer, educator, scholar, and arts administrator. She is an Irish dancer with an MA Irish dance performance from the University of Limerick. She also has experience in a variety of other percussive dance forms, as well as Brazilian movement forms including capoeira, frevo, and samba. Her ethnographic scholarship focuses on “dances of resistance” and social change through dance, especially in Brazil, Ireland, and the Eastern Caribbean (Montserrat). She was a postdoctoral Fulbright scholar in Recife, Brazil in 2018, where she studied frevo and other popular dances from Recife. She is also a synesthete (color-grapheme and colored rhythms) with a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia, where she completed a senior thesis about the effect of synesthetically induced colors on perceptual organization.
She is an adjunct instructor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches courses in dance ethnography and subversive cultures, which highlight the power of the arts to build and enact change for communities around the world. She is the marketing and communications coordinator for the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, where she amplifies the artistic and scholarly work of faculty, students, and staff. She is also co-founder and president of EducArte, a Maryland-based non-profit organization with a mission to create educational cultural arts programming and to open spaces for cultural expression by artists and their communities on their own terms.