
Kelly Hirina will join the Peabody Conservatory Dance faculty as interim instructor during the 2021-22 academic year. She will teach classes including Modern Dance Technique, Choreography, and Rehearsal & Performance Collaboration.
Hirina is a certified teacher of both Countertechnique, created by Anouk van Dijk, and Double Skin/Double Mind, created by Emio Greco and Pieter C. Scholten. She has been teaching these methods at the Lucia Marthas Institute for Performing Arts (Amsterdam) and in her role as the artistic coordinator of ICKamsterdam’s academy. These methods offer healthy approaches to the dancing body while stimulating their personal creativity. Hirina also incorporates methods from ICKamsterdam, the Sensorium Toolkit and Pre-choreographics, in choreographic development.
Originally from Michigan, Hirina moved to the Netherlands as a Fulbright scholar and continued to live and work there as a professional dancer for twenty years. She has worked with choreographers including Emio Greco & Pieter C. Scholten (EG|PC), Krisztina de Chatel, Suzy Blok, Nicole Beutler, Liat Waysbort and Dylan Newcomb and in companies such as ICKamsterdam and Dansgroep Amsterdam. She acquired her M.F.A. in Dance from the University of Michigan with research based upon the link between mind and body in dance training, rehearsal, and performance.