Amy “Catfox” Campion is a dance artist and the founder and artistic director of Antics.
Her vision is to unify diverse audiences through the transformational experience of hip-hop dance theater performances. Campion’s work crosses artistic and cultural boundaries: transplanting hip-hop dance from street to stage, mashing-up street dance vocabularies, and telling stories through a multimedia intersection of dance, theater, film, poetry, graffiti art, and music. Through a collaborative creative process, Campion crafts street dance movements into moving visual metaphors that showcase the virtuosity and expressive capacity of hip-hop art forms.
Campion’s dance experience encompasses many forms but her passion is for bgirling (breakdancing), hip-hop, and Capoeira, all of which she has practiced since 1999. She first discovered choreography as an undergraduate at the University of Washington while studying ballet and modern dance. After graduating, she performed the contemporary dance with La Nouvelle Dansa in Argentina while simultaneously learning the tango and salsa.
In 1999-2002, Campion was a founding member of Daniel Cruz’ s Cruz Control Dance Company in Seattle, WA. At the same time, she was learning Capoeira with Mestre Curisco in Capoeira Malês and training breaking with Barnyard Cannibals.
In 2006, Campion received an MFA in Choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures where she focused on incorporating storytelling and refining her compositional approach to street dance choreography for the stage.
From 2006-2009, Campion was a founding member of Jacob “Kujo” Lyon’ s Lux Aeterna Dance Company, winning the Horton Award for best performance by a company and traveling to India to shoot an underwater dance commercial.
In 2007, Campion produced, directed and co-choreographed Breaking the Cypher, the first hip-hop dance performance at the Ford Theaters in Hollywood.
In 2008, she subsequently founded the J.U.i.C.E. Hip Hop Dance Festival at the Ford Theatres.
In 2009, Campion traveled to Cuba to guest perform with Contra-Tiempo.
In 2011, Campion performed with Rennie Harris Puremovement in “Heaven”.
In 2011, Campion directed and produced Pursuit, a short dance film created for Dances Made To Order that was featured at the Dance on Camera Festival at the Lincoln Center in New York and several other festivals.
In 2012, Campion was awarded a fellowship at the Sacatar Institute in Bahia Brazil where she produced and directed a dance film called Street Dance Orixás that went on to screen at several festivals nationally and internationally. Campion’s work extends into the commercial entertainment realm where she has choreographed for and appeared in music videos, films, corporate events, and television shows.
In Los Angeles, Campion trains and performs with Capoeira Batuque under Mestre Amen Santo. She studied locking with Thomas Guzman-Sanchez of Chain Reaction, house dance with Rennie Harris, and counts Jacob “Kujo” Lyons, Ana “Rokafella” Garcia, and her crew, Barnyard Cannibals, as her Breaking mentors.
Campion has received awards from LA County Arts Commission, Culver City Cultural Affairs Commission, American Dance Abroad, the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Durfee Foundation, the Thomas Spiegel Family Foundation, the Hilton Foundation, and the Flourish Foundation, and participated in the Emerging Leaders Institute at APAP, in the LA Dance Advance initiative, and in Pentacle’ s Help Desk and the DRC’ s Back Office. She has taught dance and arts activism at Loyola Marymount University, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Northridge, El Camino College, Cerritos College, the Boys and Girls Club, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, and many others. Campion’s work has been presented internationally in Brazil at VIVADANÇA in Salvador, Bahia and Encontro de Dança in Natal, Rio Grande do Norte and nationally at the Philadelphia International Festival of Arts, the San Francisco Hip Hop Dance Fest, the B-Girl Be Festival at Inner City Arts in Minneapolis, the Esalen International Arts Festival in Big Sur, CA, and many others. Her work has been featured all over Los Angeles County at the Ford Theatres in Hollywood, Loyola Marymount University, REDCAT, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, the Levitt Pavilion at MacArthur Park, the Skirball, the Madrid Theater, the Los Angeles Theater Center, El Camino College, Cerritos College, UCLA, USC, and the Bootleg Theater as well as on Ovation TV, Strife TV, BuzzFeed, PBS, KCET, and LA36.