​MEET THE ARBURST WRITERS: Catherine Hollingsworth

Perhaps it was those ballet classes her parents enrolled her in when she was just a toddler, but it seems that ever since she was four and twirling on a dance floor, Catherine Hollingsworth got the dance and arts bug and it has never subsided.

Writing for Artburst was a natural fit for Hollingsworth, who has written for arts publications such as Artlurker, Art Papers and Art Pulse. She began writing in 2010 and at the time was working in Wynwood’s renowned Emerson-Dorsch Gallery. This was also the year she won the Artlurker writer’s prize.

“It was the first time I’d been published as a writer and this is also when I met Artburst Editor Anne Tschida, who used to come through the gallery now and then,” Hollingsworth says. “We got to talking and she found out I was a writer and a dancer and asked to write for the site, and of course I agreed.”

Having been involved in both dancing and visual art since she was a kid, for undergraduate college she was naturally inclined to go to art school. But she chose a different route. Instead, she attended Brown University and studied Liberal Arts. She did, however, major in visual arts and also had many friends that attended the nearby Rhode Island School of Design.

A stint in New York followed. “I was making work, dancing, working for other artists and living the creative life.” A move to Miami followed in 2007, where she became more deeply involved in dance and started doing more choreography and dance. And although her most recent endeavor and main focus is acupuncture, she continues to be involved in both the art and dance communities in Miami. “People are really supportive of each other here, which is something I appreciate,” Hollingsworth says.

She’s also connected the art and acupuncture worlds in her career. Aside from writing for the aforementioned publications, she also writes on Chinese medicine for Acupuncture Today and has found her arts background is useful to her in acupuncture.

“Acupuncture is very much related to my background in the arts and I see it as continuous with what I do as an artist, performer, and writer. The symbolic language of the body in dance is very much related to what I see when I am trying to determine the cause of someone’s symptoms,” she says.

Her current interests as a dancer lean towards Afro-Cuban folkloric dance, because she loves the music and also learning about the details of the folkloric dances and the stories and lessons they carry about both life and history.

And as for her latest gig with Artburst, she feels it is a great asset to the Miami dance community and city in general, bringing awareness to work that is being produced and shown here. “To me this is the value of Artburst, because dance is a temporal form and difficult to preserve. Writing and video can describe the experience of a performance in a way that photos cannot,” she says.

Thanks to the support of the local organizations that fund Artburst, “we are able to provide fairly complete, accessible coverage of the local dance scene,” she says.