Erin Kilmurray (she/they) is a Chicago-based dance artist creating genre-straddling, femme-forward performance work that demands aliveness and collectivity on stage, in studio, and with audiences. They facilitate a dance and community practice that relentlessly explores the celebrations and liberations of women, queer folks, and the underdog. Her work embraces mess, play, pleasure, and lessons in how arbitrary the line between artist and audience can be.

Erin is the creator / director of legendary queer punk dance and variety performance project The Fly Honey Show, where pleasure is king and politics favor the queens. Fly Honey was established in a DIY living space in 2010 and recently sold out rock venue Thalia Hall, was featured at Lollapalooza 2022, and named a “Chicago institution” (Chicago Reader).

She is recognized with a 2024 US Artist Fellowship Award in Dance, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awardee (2023), a Chicago Dancemakers Lab Artist (2020), and one of 50 People Who Really Perform for Chicago (2023; Newcity). Kilmurray was one of three artists commissioned for the inaugural Chicago Performs program at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2022).

Additionally, Erin has made dances for countless independent makers, parties, music videos, festivals, concerts, and theatrical productions. She is on faculty at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

My dance practice is motivated by collectivity, where I am charged to create rooms that are healing, empowering, and provocative pleasure spaces. I am driven to make creations for women and queer people to embody desire, vibrancy, release, and personal agency through dance. I am especially curious about what it means to be seen, and exploring how that relates to spectatorship and space.

My dance work lives at a place where social environments, contemporary performance forms and dancing collide. With an aesthetic orientation that sits on a pop-fringe borderline, my work is born from house parties, mosh pits, spectacle, music videos, nightlife, and dance teams. It is because of this that I am driven to make art that feels as though witnesses are on the edge of being inside of it at any second. Through these influences, my dances embrace and agitate themes like effort, mess, pleasure, play, spectacle, DIY approaches, and lessons in how arbitrary the line between artist and audience can be.

I work as a collaborative artist; crafting and choreographing energy within groups. I facilitate a bottom-up leadership style that allows me to direct devised processes built to honor each individual while functioning like a team. I propel my body, energy, resources, and artistic practice forward to make work that organizes others into a force that builds a movement with our movement.