About

About Kalila

Kalila Kingsford Smith builds interactive dance environments that are responsive to the characteristics of the performance space: whether a theater, a nature trail, a museum, or a city street. Fundamentally, she believes that dance is healing and transformative and invites performers and audiences to investigate themselves as participants in the art-making process. Informed by her training in modern and contemporary dance, her movement flows between tension and release, momentum and suspension, improvisation and composition, and storytelling and abstraction.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Kalila is a movement professional, dance educator, choreographer, writer, and pilates instructor. She is an adjunct faculty member at Drexel University and Temple University where she’s taught courses in modern dance technique, improvisation, choreography, creativity, dance history and theory. She has a MA in Dance from Temple University, and a BFA in Dance and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Michigan. She teaches pilates at Drexel Pilates and Everybody Movement and Wellness. In 2025 Kalila received her certification as an Essential Level Spiral Body Techniques® teacher. Kalila was a dance critic with thINKingDANCE for 14 years where she published reviews, interviews, and thINK pieces, and edited other articles for publication. From 2021-2025 she also served as the Director of thINKingDANCE.

Kalila Kingsford Smith Dance is a project-based vessel for choreographic explorations, developing transformative and interactive events that reflect the creative energies of each artist-collaborator involved.

Teaching Philosophy

Kalila’s approach to dance is fundamentally healing and transformational.

Her goals as a teacher are to honor each individual’s unique life experience while providing avenues towards growth and play within any movement practice.

Her primary teaching practices include Spiral Body Techniques®, somatic improvisation, modern and contemporary dance techniques, jazz and musicality, historical and cultural dance analysis, choreography and creative process, and Pilates and mindfulness practices. In any dance class, these modes can cross-pollinate to generate an informed and rigorous practice that moves the dancers through various relationships to gravity, to musicality, to tension and to release.

As an educator and as an artist, Kalila is influenced both by her teachers and her lived experiences performing in the works of various modern dance choreographers. These teachers and choreographers include Molly Shanahan, José Limón, Mary Anthony, Martha Graham, Lester Horton, Donald McKayle, Dianne McIntyre, Paul Taylor, Gwendolyn Bye, Peter Sparling, Amy Chavasse, Robin Wilson, Jessica Fogel, Melissa Beck, Judy Rice, Leah Stein, Monica Frichtel, Merian Soto, Karen Bond, Michelle Van Doeren, Nancy Berman Kantra, Kevin Maloney, Janet Pilla-Marini, Kun Yang-Lin, Rachel Kantra Beal, David Dorfman, Miriam Giguere, Jennifer Morley, and Megan Quinn.