Kate Elswit is an academic and dancer whose research on performing bodies combines dance history, performance studies theory, German cultural studies, and experimental practice. In 2009, she received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge and joined the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University, where she taught in the Department of Drama and the Division of Dance. She is currently a Lecturer in German Studies at Stanford University, and Visiting Faculty in Critical Studies at CalArts. She has won two major awards for scholarly publications: the Gertrude Lippincott Award from the Society of Dance History Scholars for her 2009 essay in TDR: The Drama Review, and the Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize from the American Society for Theatre Research for her 2008 Modern Drama essay. Her articles have also appeared in Performance Research and Art Journal, with a new essay forthcoming in the edited collection New German Dance Studies from University of Illinois Press. At present, she is finishing the manuscript for Watching Weimar Dance (forthcoming Oxford UP).

Between 2006-2009, she taught practical and theoretical courses in the graduate school at Laban, as well as interdisciplinary undergraduate topics at the University of Cambridge. She was also on the commission for Germany's first practice-led masters degree in dance. As a practitioner she has danced professionally and her choreographic work has appeared in solo performances and festivals in the USA and Europe. She is on the editorial board for Dance Theatre Journal.