MK Ford
artist's statement
My work orbits the radical terrain of embodiment, interdependence, and transformation. Rooted in queerness, mutual aid, and collective futurity, I explore how performance—especially dance—can be both a strategy and a shelter, a transmission system for personal and political urgency. Fueled by themes of code shifting, grief, digital humanity, cyborg mythologies, and the bittersweet iconography of gay cowboys crooning at the moon, my practice insists on the tenderness of direct action and the necessity of storytelling.
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I work across dance, film, animation, and visual art—each medium offering its own dimensional language. In dance, I engage contemporary forms, floorwork, partnered improvisation, and street style foundations to blur the boundaries between artifice and artifact, fantasy and memory. Dance is where abstraction becomes a place to rehearse liberation. It’s where we agree, if only briefly, that viewership is positional, spectacle is embodied, and the body in motion is a high-stakes archive—simultaneously haunted and hopeful.
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My film and ScreenDance work grapples with the impossibility of presence, the tension of gaze, and the intimacy of the edit. These works are modular, emotionally saturated, and often glitchy by design. Symbols repeat: magenta as the void, cowboys as DIY futurity, cyborgs as coexistence and collapse. I carry each frame like a relic. My interest in technology is not in perfection but in pliability—how it distorts, fails, and reveals. I animate my cyborgian perspective through personal, heartfelt stories thrown through choreography, animation, and embodied gesture.
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My process begins in rupture—love, anger, grief, or desire cracking something open. From that fracture, I build alongside chosen kin. My collaborators are comrades. The studio extends to the backyard, the tarot spread, the backseat of the car. Our work is antidisciplinary, sometimes messy, always bodily. We make—clumsily, reverently, hilariously—until something takes shape.
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Influenced by trans/queer futurisms, contemporary dance theater, punk and street cultures, and the architectures of kinship, my work dreams toward survivable futures. I aim to build spaces—both real and imagined—where the unspeakable parts of our experience can be witnessed, held, and protected. The body is on the line. My body is on the line. In the face of systemic erasure, I choose to gather, to sense, to move. This is life and death—and in that liminal space, we keep finding new reasons to dance.
From Current WIP (see "Projects")
Photo by Mark Williams with Christina Collins, MK Ford, Brit Falcon, and Ryan Smith
BIO
BIO; TLDR
MK Ford (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary dance cyborg. Their work features elements from dance, film/media studies, and visual arts. Their performative and choreographic work takes the shape of live performance, ScreenDance, and installation. MK has gotten DOWN with lots of amazing choreographers and is currently performing with Kendra Portier, Brit Falcon, and more. MK has premiered work at various dance or film festivals around the U.S., and they currently teach dance techniques, screen-centered theory+creative process, and yoga.
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BIO: for the long-form fans
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MK Ford (they/them) is a dance artist currently on faculty at Arizona State University where they are a clinical professor of dance and media. Ford holds a MFA in Dance Performance, Choreography, and Pedagogy at the University of Maryland College Park with an inaugural assistantship through the Maya Brin Institute for Technology in New Performance. Their work features elements from dance, film/media studies, digital humanities, qu**r theory, and visual arts. Their performative and choreographic work takes the shape of live performance, screendance, and installation. MK holds a BFA in Dance Performance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Ford’s pursuits in the arts are largely informed by their interests in intersectional strategies of subversion, distortion, knowledge translation, disruption, radical healing + pleasure, satire, gaze/surveillance, archive, time lapse, and glitch activation. MK is an artist working within realms of embodied moving practices laced with qu**r theory, digital humanities, and ecological theories of human+machine networks. Ford was initially grown in Louisville, Kentucky where they were introduced to grassroots, community legacies, and D.I.Y. mechanisms and this often is proposed in their work through melancholy, macabre, satire, stubborn D.I.Y. facilitation, and community-centered choreography. MK's dance training includes hybrid contemporary techniques that trace lineages to Street Styles, Postmodern dance, Euro-style floorwork practices, and more.
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Their screendance work has been featured at film festivals around the U.S. including the American Dance Festival Movies by Movers, the Utah Dance Film Festival, Bates Dance Festival Informal Film Festival, American College Dance Association Nationals, Cleveland Dance Festival, Third Coast Dance Film Festival, Experimental Series - Salt Lake City, Illinifest, and various concerts at the University of Maryland College-Park. Ford has assisted in cinematic direction, editing, or promotion for choreographers Brit Falcon, Gesel Mason, Vanessa Anspaugh, Bree Breeden, Shartoya R. Jn.Baptiste, André Zachery, Christina Collins, Dan Ortiz Leizman, PearsonWidrig Kendra Portier, Rebecca Steinberg, Tristan Koepke, Sarah Marks Mininsohn, Mauriah Kraker + Leah Wilks, Javi Padilla, and Gerson Lanza.
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MK has performed with both choreographers and visual artists such as Abby Zbikowski + Momar Ndiaye, Charlotte Richardson-Deppe, Kendra Portier, Carlo Antonio Villanueva, Maura Keefe, Brit Falcon, Rebecca Steinberg, Roxane D’orleans Juste, Jennifer Monson, Endalyn Taylor, Linda Lehovec, Renée Wadleigh + Nico Brown, Louisville’s Moving Collective company, and more.
Their choreographic work for the stage has been featured at various dance concerts at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, the Washington D.C. Choreographic Showcase, the Cleveland Dance Festival, the Chicago j e l l o series, Louisville Dance Series’ Hindsight, and more. Ford co-authored the published written document, “Stock Motion Performances: Gestural Publics and Digital Intimacy” with Kate Ladenheim, Leo Grierson, and Timothy Kelley.
Ford's teaching experience spans across community workshops, studio classes, scientific studies, and collegiate courses. They teach contemporary dance techniques, introductory dance courses, screendance, dance theory courses, dance and media, and yoga.
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Ford’s extended dance training has occurred through work-study, staff, and fellowship positions at American Dance Festival, Bates Dance Festival, the Field Center (Faye Driscoll workshop), the New Dialect Summer Intensive, Countertechnique OBOC, STREB labs, and David Dorfman Dance Intensives. Ford also holds a 200-h E-RYT yoga certification and leads Hatha and Vinyasa practices, including specialty class techniques such as chair yoga, restorative yoga, and workshops on yoga anatomy, yogic philosophy, and creative languaging in yoga. Their freelance work includes dance documentation, video editing, archive, and social media support. Further, Ford has collaborated on projects such as the National Orchestral Institute Innovation Studio, web development, graphic design, visual art commissions, and animation commissions.