Hetty King
PS 145K The Magnet School for Leadership Through Engineering
Hetty King, Pre-K-5
PS 145K The Magnet School for Leadership Through Engineering
After almost twenty years working as a professional dancer and choreographer, Hetty was determined to continue to work in the field of dance even as she moved away from the concert stage. Initially, she imagined herself teaching in higher education at a college or university however the need to support herself while completing her MA brought her to the Lincoln Center Institute where she was introduced to teaching young children in public school. She was hooked. The need to learn more about how to translate what she knew and had experienced as an artist to the dance classroom brought her to DEL, where she found the structure and pedagogy to build her teacher’s heart and grow her pedagogy around the creative process, dance-making, and the building blocks of Laban Movement Analysis creating an inclusive, joyful teaching and learning experience grounded in dance and movement.
Hetty King BFA, MFA, MA, CMA, TT®, RYT200, RSDE/ISMETA, NYS Licensed Dance Educator is a native New Yorker. She has been a part of the NYC dance and performance world as a performer, choreographer, dance educator, writer, and scholar since she graduated from the High School of Performing Arts in 1982. Her work has been presented in NYC and across Canada. As a performer, Hetty danced in the company of numerous choreographers, Ralph Lemon, and David Dorfman, to name a few. Since 2000 Hetty has worked as a teaching artist and Dance Educator in public and private schools. As a devoted student of the late somatic movement pioneer Nancy Topf, Hetty nurtured a deep love of the somatic arts as they relate to dance, embodiment, and the education of the whole child. Hetty completed Nancy’s posthumous manuscript – A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice the Anatomy of Center – published by the University Press of Florida in 2022. Hetty is a doctoral student in the EdD Dance Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research interests are in the intersection of somatic education and dance education in early childhood, and the possibility of ‘personal literacy’ through dance education. She has published in CQ Unbound, Dance Education in Practice, and The Journal of Dance Education. She is the full-time dance educator, PreK3-5 at PS 145 in Bushwick. King lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a theatre technician at the Metropolitan Opera, their two adopted daughters, and their cat Clyde.