Partners in the Arts: Dancing through life with Gregory Catellier and Kristin O’Neal

One recent evening, Gregory Catellier and Kristin O’Neal sat side by side, watching students rehearse in the Emory University Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts Dance Studio. Together, they were creating a piece set to “Beautiful Mechanical” by American chamber ensemble yMusic for the Emory Dance Company fall concert. As the dancers moved through phrase work that combined displays of strength — flexed biceps in muscle-man poses, lifts and shared weight work, with moments of total collapse, full-body contractions and dramatic falls — the choreographers kept up a quiet stream of chatter between them. O’Neal took notes.

Once the run through was complete, she and Catellier offered corrections and tinkered with the choreography, refining transitions or emphasizing contrasts in direction or quality. Rather than taking turns speaking, they seemed instead to weave their remarks together into a seamless flow. The easy, companionable rhythm of their collaboration reflected both their complementary strengths as artists and the enviable rapport this husband-and-wife duo have found in their romantic partnership.

Describing how they work together, O’Neal explained, “Making work with a big group is not my wheelhouse, but it’s Greg’s in a beautiful way.” She continued, “There is something very, very special about how he sees space. In these group settings, I rely on him for that.”

For her part, O’Neal brings an encyclopedic knowledge of the embodied sensations of what steps and gestures feel like to the dancer and how the dancers’ sensations translate into different qualities of effort, emotion and even meaning for the audience. “Kristin sees things that I don’t,” said Catellier. “And she has this ability to just keep researching and to go deeper and deeper and deeper, improvising the fine material, which makes her the better coach.”

Catellier spent several years dancing and choreographing in Phoenix and New York before receiving a master of fine arts from Ohio State University with a concentration in dance lighting design and production. He moved to Atlanta in 2002 to take up his current position as a professor of practice in dance at Emory, where in addition to teaching and choreographing he is the resident dance lighting designer. Catellier is a frequent design collaborator on staibdance productions, and he is regularly credited as a lighting and stage designer in the programs of other Atlanta-based independent artists and dance companies, including Annalee Traylor and Full Radius Dance.

O’Neal received her master of fine arts from the Hollins University/American Dance Festival program. Throughout her career, she has been interested in solo performance and character studies. Her body of work includes a collection of solos, many of them living in the repertoire of Sarasota Contemporary Dance in Florida that were inspired by her grandmothers, Glenna and Dorothy, and her aunts and great aunts, June, Helen, Diane, Constance and Nell. O’Neal’s other research focus on site-specific work led to her ongoing collaboration with Dale Andree and National Water Dance, which Andree founded in 2011 as the Florida Waterways Dance Project. O’Neal was on the dance faculty of the University of Florida from 2008 until 2014, when she moved to Atlanta to join Catellier. 

The couple met when O’Neal was mounting her MFA thesis production at American Dance Festival and Catellier was the master electrician.

“It’s the end of the season, and I’m already tired,” recalled Catellier. “And Kristin comes in with like a thousand pink shoes that all need to be hung.”

“It wasn’t a thousand,” O’Neal corrected him. “It was only about 300.”

“Oh, just 300,” he responded with gentle irony. “I’m already annoyed with everybody. I’m annoyed that we have to even do these thesis projects, but then Kristin comes in, so chipper and so prepared.”

“I am the overpreparer extraordinaire,” O’Neal added.

“She made it so easy and showed so much respect for the crew,” said Catellier. “In the end, it was magical, with all those pink shoes flying in as part of the piece.”

At the time, they were both in relationships with other people. So even though they made a connection, they went their separate ways until reconnecting by chance at the Bates Dance Festival, where Catellier served as resident lighting designer from 2009 to 2018.

“It’s a very busy job,” said Catellier. “You don’t really get to take classes much at the Festival, but this one year, Kristin and I both happened to be in a class with Heidi Henderson. And I was watching Kristin dance, and she was watching me dance.”

“And I was, like ‘wow, I finally get to see you move,’” O’Neal said. “‘This is so cool,’ because, up until that point, I had only seen him working as a lighting designer.”

Catellier proposed that the two of them create a duet. In spite of the fact that the collaboration would involve a five-hour commute, and apparently also whipped cream, O’Neal immediately accepted.

“It was a kind of flirty little piece where we would put whipped cream on each other and then lick it off,” said Catellier.

“Yeah, yeah, but it’s in ridiculous places,” O’Neal clarified. “Places where you might even think, ‘Oh gross!’” O’Neal recalled as they both laughed.

Their artistic partnership evolved into a romantic relationship that continued long-distance for a couple of years before O’Neal moved to Atlanta. The two were married in 2017, which O’Neal said was “more about health insurance than the need to document our committed lives together.”

Unlike many of the partners in the arts that ArtsATL has profiled, O’Neal and Catellier not only work in the same artistic discipline, they work for the same employer. O’Neal is an instructor in dance at Emory. For the most part, sharing a field and a workplace is a boon for their relationship.

“We get to teach contact improvisation together. That is a blessing for both of us,” said Catellier.

“It became very clear to me very early on,” said O’Neal, “that this world, dance, this community was going to take up a lot of my time, so finding someone who is in it full-time as well just felt right.”

On the purely practical side, working in the same place means they get to spend more time together than they would otherwise in careers filled with late nights and busy weekends. One partner might pick up lunch for both of them. They can carpool. When all hands are on deck in the department preparing for a concert, they can talk while engaged in the labor of moving props and setting the stage. Pitching in for one another on a task means they both get home sooner, where they can prepare a meal together, something else they love to do. Catellier is the chef, and O’Neal is the sous and baker.

With regard to their art, the partnership Catellier and O’Neal have forged expanded their creative horizons. Together, they have pushed and pulled one another into territory they never would have explored alone.

For example, in one duet, Nostalgia for a Future Past, O’Neal said, “There were definitely some places in that piece where Greg said to me, ‘Oh no, I can’t believe we’re going there.’ And I had to reassure him, ‘No, no, it’s great; it’s so perfect.’” Similarly, she initially responded to some of Catellier’s ideas with skepticism, only to realize how clearly his own vision was steering them in those moments.

“We have chemistry,” agreed Catellier. “This will sound self-deprecating, but people really like Kristin. They all want to go up and give her a hug, and people are more standoffish with me. I’m a little standoffish, which is one of the reasons making dances about community is important to me — because that’s where I find my community,” he continued. When they dance together, even when they socialize together, in O’Neal’s orbit, Catellier feels as though he shines with a bit of her refracted charisma.

One of their more recent collaborations Hope Horizon, which they created initially for Sarasota Contemporary Dance and then reworked and restaged with Atlanta-based dancers for the 2025 Modern Atlanta Dance Festival, takes up the question of why community is so important to them both. “It’s about finding peace of mind, or actually peace of heart in a world that at times seems increasingly chaotic,” said Catellier.

“We live among some really beautiful people here in Atlanta, and we all lift each other up by dancing together,” he continued. “This is what we do. The dancing helps us all get through this.”

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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a bachelor of arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.