The Ailey School

Katrina Manansala is a native of Rochester, MN, where she began dancing at three years old. At the age of five, she began training in figure skating and ice dance, and would do so for the next 11 years. At her home studio, Allegro School of Dance and Music, she studied ballet, general modern dance, jazz, and piano. In addition to participating in numerous Allegro productions, she worked as a teaching assistant and eventually as a substitute guest teacher for the school. Katrina has performed productions choreographed by Matthew Keefe through Children’s Dance Theatre of Rochester, as well as danced in Rochester Ensemble of Dance, in which she also choreographed her own work. In 2015 she attended The Ailey School as a summer Junior Division Summer Intensive. She returned to The Ailey School for two subsequent summers, and then as a student in the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program in Dance, where she was a staff writer for The Observer and President of the Filipino culture club on campus. While studying towards a BFA with a double minor in Classical Civilizations and Disability Studies, Katrina was also on an accelerated path towards an M.A. in Ethics and Society through Fordham University. She hopes to travel the world studying and documenting traditional cultural dances and to eventually bring more inclusivity and accessibility into the world of dance.