Corinne Imberski is a Chicago based dance performer, choreographer, improviser, and educator. As an independent dance artist, Corinne has presented solo and ensemble works for over thirty years, at venues grand, small, impromptu, and digital. Her latest solo work, Your Stillness Resembles, will premiere in 2025. This project was started through a grant from Chicago Dancemakers Forum (Dance Chance program), and she shared a work-in-progress performance in July 2024 at the Sherman Park Fieldhouse (Chicago), which featured live accompaniment by Chicago musician Lia Kohl. In 2023, she was awarded a residency at the Ragdale Foundation (Lake Forest, IL). Also in 2023, Corinne premiered a new dance for camera project, The Dreamer, through a residency from See Chicago Dance that she received in 2022. In June of 2021, she performed the shadow comforts the body as part of Chicago Takes Ten, a video performance series sponsored by the Walder Foundation. This duet was a restaging of a work she created as a Links Hall Co-MISSION Summer Residency recipient. In April 2020, Corinne started the video project Roof Series 2020-2021 as a response to life in quarantine and crisis. She has taught and staged her choreography throughout the country, including at the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Columbia College Chicago, Grand Valley State University, University of Toledo, American College Dance Festival, Midwest RAD Fest, Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, Toledo Museum of Art, Dance Art Museum of the Americas Project, DDCdances, the Dance Dimension, and at the Cranbrook Academy. The Chicago Tribune praised her as having “sensitivity and a keen sense of weight and energy shifting through the body creating an infectious dynamic”. Her choreographic work has been called “silky-smooth, delicate and [a] detail oriented ride” and “quietly magnificent”. Corinne is a grateful recipient of the 2020 Meier Achievement Award, an award given to Chicago-area artists each year by the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Charitable Foundation for the Arts. She was nominated as “Best Dancer” and “Best Choreographer” in the 2021 Chicago Reader’s Best of Chicago poll.
In addition to presenting her own work, Corinne also performs and collaborates with award winning Ayako Kato/Art Union Humanscape. Most recently, they collaborated on two duets for composer Matthew Mehlan’s music/game premiere Slow Dances, which was live-streamed in March 2021as part of Experimental Sound Studio’s Quarantine Concerts. In 2018, she and Kato co-choreographed a duet, Northern Shadow, that was commissioned by Ann Arbor Dance Works for their 33rd annual season. Also in 2018, she performed (alongside Kato, and musicians/dancers Christina Martin, Wilson Tanner Smith, and Jeff Kimmel) in Kato’s world premiere of Stück/Anchor 2018. Her performance was noted in the Chicago Tribune: “Smith and Imberski do much of the heavy lifting in the first section of Stück, with Imberski first joining the musicians by plunking out those tones on piano. When Imberski is eventually compelled to stand from the piano bench, she begins to move with guttural gestures mixed with rises and falls that kowtow toward Smith’s direction. As this morphs and evolves into gorgeous long lines mimicking flight, a stoicism pours out of her body.” Other highlights include What is Movement (conceived and directed by Kato, performance and movement collaboration by cast), a dance based inquiry into movement and stillness that was presented at both the Pivot Arts Festival and Mana Contemporary Chicago; and dancing in Journeying La Divina Commedia: Desert, Discovery, Song, a world premiere of an interdisciplinary sacred music drama performed at the University of Notre Dame.
Corinne has been a company member of RE|dance group, a dance-theater company based in Chicago, since 2014. RE|dance group features the choreography of directors Michael Estanich and Lucy Riner. With the company, she has danced at numerous festivals throughout the midwest, including Midwest RAD Fest, Minnesota Fringe Festival, Harvest Chicago Contemporary Dance Festival, Chicago Dance Day, and American College Dance Festival, as well as in theaters throughout Chicago and the US. RE|dance group is dedicated to presenting site specific works in addition to traditional theaters, so Corinne has had the pleasure of dancing in many wonderful Chicago locales, including Northerly Island, North Park Nature Center, the 606/Bloomingdale Trail, and along the Chicago Riverwalk.
She was a featured performer with Detroit based DDCdances from 1999-2011, dancing in the works of José Limón, founders Paula Kramer and Barbara Selinger, as well as her own choreography commissioned by the company. She has also performed as a guest artist with HNM Dance Company (Windsor, Ontario), Ann Arbor Dance Works, and Peter Sparling Dance Company (Ann Arbor, Michigan) where she appeared in, among other works, his Public Television film Climbing Sainte-Victoire: A Danced Homage to Paul Cézanne.
Corinne received her MFA in Dance Choreography and Performance from the University of Michigan, and a BA in English from the University of Maryland. She is certified as both a yoga teacher (RYT 200) and a Pilates instructor (Stott).
Contact Corinne directly at: