Kat (she/they) is a dance instructor, body empowerment consultant, and fat liberation activist based in Oakland, CA. She teaches weekly low-impact dance and fitness classes at Hipline studio in Oakland, and provides consultation and training for movement spaces and fitness instructors on how to steward more empowering movement spaces for bodies of all shapes & sizes. Kat also teaches a monthly class for fat and plus-size dancers called Big Thick Energy, and loves to host fat-positive community events in the Bay Area, including Big Fat Pool Parties.

Kat began dancing at age two in Alabama where she was born and raised. She became a competition dancer, and her first dance teaching job was at age 16. In college, she explored Modern dance at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina. After college Kat taught at DanceFX and performed with The Charleston Dance Project. She also taught children’s Creative Movement in schools around the Charleston area.

Kat was a Peace Corps Volunteer in El Salvador from 2009-2011, where she started an award-winning local youth dance troupe.

In 2012, Kat moved to the Bay area, and performed in the San Francisco International HipHop Dance Fest. The following year she moved to Oakland, and has been there since.

She took a hiatus from dance until 2015 when she spontaneously auditioned for a local HipHop crew (as one does) and she re-entered dance in a new community-oriented, body diverse crew called Bodywerk Dance.They performed all over the Bay until 2020 when the group disbanded, though she kept lifelong friends.

Kat’s body journey up until this point had been a push and pull struggle between stretches of dieting, anti-fatness, intentional weight loss, and then inevitable weight gain, burnout, injuries, and retreating from movement and dance.

Throughout this cycle, it had often felt like she needed to “get in shape” before returning to dance. At this point in time she had two knee injuries (each occurring after a cycle of weight loss and regain) and was managing chronic pain (from injuries and hypermobility).

Kat had been realizing that dieting and obsessive exercise had not given her what it promised, was not a life she wanted, nor did it align with her values of inclusion, diversity, access, feminism, anti-racism, and anti-capitalism.

In the midst of the COVID19 pandemic, one silver lining was extra time. Kat decided to use this time to dive deeply into healing her relationship to her body, stop dieting for good, uproot her anti-fatness, and nurture her relationship to movement and dance.

It was in pulling at this thread that Kat realized that anti-fatness is part of a tapestry of oppression that is all interconnected, and that her personal healing journey was much bigger than herself. It was in this work that Kat found their place in fat liberation work.

In 2021 Kat started her first project, BodyLovedance, which focused on body image healing, which evolved, along with her personal journey, into Big Thick Energy, which focuses on liberation, fat joy, and the power of community.

The first Big Thick Energy dance class for fat bodies was in July 2022, and the first Big Fat Pool Party (collaboration with FierceFatFemme) happened that September. The rest is history and more fun to watch in this instagram video.

In 2022 Kat had begun working with Hipline dance and fitness studio as an instructor and also a Body Empowerment Consultant, a role that developed as Kat and the studio owner, Gabriela, shared mutual dreams of making the space safer for bodies of all shapes & sizes.

Kat is currently completing a BodyTrust Professional Certification and a Movement Therapy Practitioner training to add to thier toolbox for working with individuals.

Kat identifies as a fat, queer, disabled white woman with Lebanese ancestry. She lives with her two cats, Neko & Kitana, who are the loves of her life. She loves dancing, being in water, crafting, whale-watching, enjoying food, being a cool aunt, staying up late, and going to see queer performance art.