Catie Cuan

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Catie Cuan
Catie Cuan.jpg
Alma mater
Occupation Choreographer, researcher, roboticist   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
Website catiecuan.com   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Catie Cuan is an artist, entrepeuneur, and innovator in the field of robotic art and human-robot interaction, where she specializes in choreorobotics, an emerging field at the intersection of choreographic dance and robotics [1] [2] . Catie Cuan is currently one of the academic researchers pioneering the field of choreorobotics [3] and currently holds a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

Contents

Career

Catie Cuan earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated with a Ph.D. from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, focusing in robotics. Her most cited publication is about how to improve robotic expressive systems using tools from dance theory, such as the Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis. [4] In her most recent research projects, she explores a predictive model of imitation learning for robots moving around humans, a project that advances the field of social robotics. [5]

Cuan credits her work in robotics to the experience with her father when he had a stroke and was surrounded by many medical machines, which made her think about how people might feel empowered and hopeful rather than afraid. [6]

As a ballet dancer and choreographer, she has performed with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. [6] In 2020, she was the dancer and choreographer of the show Output, which was part of a collaboration with ThoughtWorks Arts and the Pratt Institute. In the production, she danced with an ABB IRB 6700 industrial robot. [6] [7] [8]

In 2022, she was named as an IF/THEN ambassador for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The same year, she was appointed Futurist-in-Residence at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building, where she performed at the closing ceremonies of the FUTURES exhibit on July 6, 2022. [9] [10]

Cuan has also contributed to product designs, working with IDEO and Dutch interior design firm moooi on their Piro project, which launched a dancing scent diffuser robot during Milan Design Week in June 2022. [11] [12] [13]

She is a TED speaker with talks about how to teach robots to dance, and what is coming up for dancing robots in the AI era. [14]

References

  1. ↑ "Clock, Fall: Choreorobotics and Near Futures of Choreographic Practice". metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & Basel. April 18, 2024. Retrieved June 22, 2025.
  2. ↑ University, © Stanford; Stanford; California 94305 (November 11, 2021). "Choreorobotics: An Emerging Discipline". SystemX Alliance. Retrieved June 22, 2025.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  3. ↑ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved June 22, 2025.
  4. ↑ LaViers, Amy; Cuan, Catie; Maguire, Catherine; Bradley, Karen; Brooks Mata, Kim; Nilles, Alexandra; Vidrin, Ilya; Chakraborty, Novoneel; Heimerdinger, Madison; Huzaifa, Umer; McNish, Reika; Pakrasi, Ishaan; Zurawski, Alexander (March 23, 2018). "Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems". Arts. 7 (2): 11. doi: 10.3390/arts7020011 . ISSN   2076-0752.
  5. ↑ Cuan, Catie; Lee, Tsang-Wei Edward; Fisher, Emre; Francis, Anthony; Takayama, Leila; Zhang, Tingnan; Toshev, Alexander; Pirk, Sören (2025). "Gesture2Path: Imitation Learning for Gesture-Aware Navigation". In Palinko, Oskar; Bodenhagen, Leon; Cabibihan, John-John; Fischer, Kerstin; Šabanović, Selma; Winkle, Katie; Behera, Laxmidhar; Ge, Shuzhi Sam; Chrysostomou, Dimitrios (eds.). Social Robotics. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 15561. Singapore: Springer Nature. pp. 264–279. doi:10.1007/978-981-96-3522-1_24. ISBN   978-981-96-3522-1.
  6. 1 2 3 "How these humanities graduates are finding jobs in Silicon Valley". PBS NewsHour. December 7, 2018. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  7. ↑ Cuan, Catie (April 1, 2021). "OUTPUT: Choreographed and Reconfigured Human and Industrial Robot Bodies Across Artistic Modalities". Frontiers in Robotics and AI. 7: 576790. doi: 10.3389/frobt.2020.576790 . ISSN   2296-9144. PMC   8049110 . PMID   33869292.
  8. ↑ Wolff, Benjamin. "The Arts And Humanities Deliver Untapped Value For The Future Of Work". Forbes. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  9. ↑ "Futurist In Residence". Smithsonian AIB. December 30, 2021. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  10. ↑ "Closing Press Release". Smithsonian AIB. June 8, 2022. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  11. ↑ "Moooi Has a Vision for Fusing the Physical and Digital". SURFACE. June 16, 2022. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  12. ↑ Spears, Tim (June 8, 2022). "moooi, LG OLED and IDEO opens extraordinary world of design and technology". designboom | architecture & design magazine. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  13. ↑ Cleary, Mary (July 20, 2022). "The most innovative designs in home fragrance". wallpaper.com. Retrieved November 16, 2022.
  14. ↑ Cuan, Catie. "Catie Cuan | Speaker | TED". www.ted.com. Retrieved June 22, 2025.
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