Karen Nelson's 40+ years in the field brings classic approaches and evolutional admittance, somatic and embodied insistence, curiosity and willingness to learn on the job. Karen continues to inhabit a crossroad of dance improvisation in the US’ Pacific Northwest and abroad. A dance explorer, teacher, maker, touring performer, author/contributor to Dancing with Dharma and Contact Quarterly, she has been a practitioner and mutator of the form Contact Improvisation (CI) since 1977. She co-founded mixed-ability experiments Dance Ability and Diverse Dance Research Retreat and integrates Material for the Spine (Steve Paxton) and Tuning Scores (Lisa Nelson) into her practice along with interrogating impacts of whiteness in her own white body, and across communities she encounters and lives within.