Nattie Trogdon + Hollis Bartlett are partners in both life and their creative endeavors. Based in Lenapehoking / / Brooklyn NY - they construct dance works, films and research based practices aimed to disrupt assumptions of performance and personhood.

Their collaborations began with Transmuting , a work focusing on the intersection between physical rigor and sustained repetition. They developed their shared voice with support from Gibney as Work Up 5.0 artists and have since been presented at venues including The River to River Festival, Center for Performance Research, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Coffey Street Studios, Future Dance Festival at the 92 Y, Duo Multicultural Arts Center, School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, The 14th street Y, Judson Church, Earthdance, The Dance Complex and the No Theme Festival. Their site-specific films have been commissioned by the Brown University, Brick Alley Block Party at Garner Arts Center, The Long Time Texas, Motion State Dance Festival, and the Mobile Dance Film Festival.

They have been artists in residence at LMCC, The 14th Street Y, MAD Arts, The Croft, Marble House Project, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Visionary, MOtiVE Brooklyn, Chapman Steamer Arts, Monira Foundation, Mana Contemporary, Leimay, NYU, and Gibney and have received support from the FCA, Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels, Rauschenberg, and the Howard Gilman Foundation. In 2023, they were the first collaborative pair awarded the New Directions Choreography Lab residency and development program at The Ailey School. Their writings and work have been featured in Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence and Gibney’s Imagining Journal.

Their performing and teaching practices are deeply tied into their dance making. As performers, they’ve worked with Kathy Westwater, Doug Varone, Brian Brooks, Joanna Kotze, David Dorfman, Kimberly Bartosik, Raja Feather Kelly, and Catherine Galasso. They’ve been guest artists at Princeton University, NYU, Swarthmore College, Rutgers, and SUNY Brockport and received commissions from SJSU, The Ailey School, SUNY Purchase, Roger Williams, Montclair State, University of Maryland, and Salem State University. Their administrative and curatorial skills have been utilized by organizations such as Bates Dance Festival, Dance NYC Junior Committee, DNA, freeskewl, DTW, and they helped to build the artist-run affordable class platform - skewl. Currently they are adjunct faculty at SUNY Purchase and Montclair State and teach open classes throughout NYC.

Nattie is Boricua, born and raised in rural North Carolina. She is a graduate of the high school program at the UNC School of the Arts and received her BFA from SUNY Purchase. Her senior thesis was recognized for choreographic excellence at the 2012 daCI/WDA Global Dance Summit in Taipei, Taiwan.

Hollis, born in Illinois and raised in Massachusetts, received his BFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, where he studied abroad at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. He spent 12 years as a performer, rehearsal director and licensing/staging manager for Doug Varone and Dancers.

Artist Statement

As partners in both life and creative endeavors, our work is inherently collaborative and lives in the plurality of highly codified forms and rigorous improvised tasks. Our movement is rooted in our modern and post-modern dance lineage, and we use a deep exploration of effort and form as the physical mediums for our research.

We use movements such as shaking as a way of sifting through emotions that are held in the body, unison to play with gendered assumptions of performance and personhood, repetition as a way to explore the physical and mental stamina required to test the limits of our bodies, and stillness as a way to hold and shift time. Within our work, we build worlds that are superficially filled with line, shape, and design. These formalist ideas construct a skewed sense of the familiar - and allow us, within the worlds we build, to subvert the traditional ideals in our bodies, our notions of performance, and the spaces we dance inside.



In our current choreographic research, we are mining the body as a reverential archive of dance history - experimenting with reconfiguration, interpretation, and abstraction of this archive and blurring the legibility of embodied histories and personal desires. By constructing dance from a dancer’s perspective, we create experimental and risk-taking work that questions our understanding of originality, possession, and meaning-making.

Hollis + Nattie CV