Kitty Lunn, RDE*

SAG, AFTRA, AEA

 

 

Ms. Lunn’s love affair with the dance began at the age of eight, when her grandmother took her to see the film, The Red Shoes.  By the time she was fifteen, she was dancing principal roles with the New Orleans Civic Ballet, where she made her professional debut in the title role in Coppelia.

 

Her work in New Orleans led to a scholarship to the Washington Ballet where she studied and worked with both Mary Day and the great ballet master, Edward Caton.  Numerous ballets in which she danced include Swan Lake, Giselle, Les Sylphide and The Nutcracker.  While in Washington, Ms. Lunn worked with such dance legends as Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille, Jose Limon and Eric Bruhn.

 

Thirty-Two years ago, while preparing for her first Broadway show, she slipped on ice, fell down a flight of stairs and broke her back.  Now a paraplegic, using a wheelchair, Ms. Lunn works diligently on behalf of performing artists with disabilities.  In the Fall of 1995, she founded Infinity Dance Theater, a non-traditional dance company featuring dancers with and without disabilities. Infinity Dance Theater is committed to bringing the joy and drama of motion and movement to a new level of inclusion by expanding the boundaries of dance and changing the world’s perception of what a dancer is.  To this end, she has developed a wheelchair dance technique strongly rooted in and growing out of Classical Ballet and Modern Dance.  She is one of the few dance artists teaching traditional dance techniques to students with disabilities, and is a frequent guest teacher and lecturer at major universities throughout the United States.

 

Ms. Lunn founded the wheelchair dance program for the National Dance Institute at PS 199, The wheelchair dance program at the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts (see video on Infinity’s website) The dance program at the Crotchet Mountain School in New Hampshire, taught in the Arts Access Program at the Metheny School and Hospital, Peapack, NJ, as well as residencies at Manhattan School for Children and Lincoln Center Institute.

 

 

*Registered Dance Educator