Katie Elliott has created, produced and choreographed original evening-length dance/theater works that embrace diverse movement vocabularies, visual styles and musical sources. With her husband and co-director, Jim LaVita, she has constructed works that speak to human universals with a thoughtful and socially aware vision. Through her art she attempts to awaken the widest and most diverse audience to timely issues through original works of dance/theater art. Her major works have addressed issues of migration, age, faith, tradition, personal psychology, and natural disaster.

Her works have appeared on the stage in Colorado, where the company is based, as well as at the International Dance Festival in Hong Kong, in Taipei, Taiwan, at the American College Dance Festivals in Washington D.C. and Tempe, Arizona, on campuses such as Colorado State University, Middle Tennessee State University, the University of Colorado, Utah State University and the University of Utah. Elliott has also collaborated on numerous works in different genres including stand alone pieces and site-specific works. She has worked with Grammy-nominated musician Art Lande on an improvisatory music/dance concert in five movements (Objects In Mirror...), with Hannah Kahn Dance Company, with nationally-known jazz choreographer, Nancy Cranbourne, and her company, “40 Women Over 40,” and with companies such as Boulder Ballet and Ballet Nouveau Colorado. This past summer Elliott taught and choreographed for the Boulder Jazz Dance Workshop and Interweave Dance Company.

Site-specific works and installations have appeared at the Denver Art Museum, SPARK Gallery in Denver, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Colorado Art Institute. Elliott created a work around the Laser Harp, constructed by visual artist Jen Lewin, and for the opening of the visual arts project, The Veil: Visible and Invisible Spaces, curated by author Jennifer Heath at The Dairy Center for the Arts.

She and her husband and co-director, Jim LaVita, are the recipients of the 2009 Colorado Dance Alliance "Cutting Edge" Award, and, in 2008, in recognition of her art, she received a Neodata Endowment Fellowship for Dance (awarded every three years) for the artistic excellence of her accumulated body of work in dance.

Elliott teaches professional classes in modern dance technique through the company. She has been invited to teach Master Classes in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Denver, and across the country. She began her teaching career as an instructor for the University of Utah Liberal Arts Dance Program and as a guest artist at Utah State University. In Colorado, Elliott has been a faculty member at the School of Boulder Ballet and the Colorado Repertory Dance School, where she taught beginning to professional level modern technique and composition classes. Elliott graduated from the BFA program at the University of Utah, where she received the Dee R. Winterton Award for outstanding choreography. At Utah she studied with Abby Fiat. She trained and performed in London where she was on full scholarship with the London Contemporary School of Dance, and in New York as a full scholarship student with the Jennifer Muller Dance Company, and for two years at the School of the Chicago Ballet.

Elliott had also been awarded scholarships to The Graham School and the Cunningham Studio and studied with M. Darvash, at Darvash Ballet Studio in New York, and Finis Young. Previously she trained in Colorado with Barbara Demaree and Larry Boyette at Ballet Arts Studio. A native of Boulder, she returned to the Denver/Boulder area, where she danced with the Hannah Kahn Dance Company, Colorado Repertory Dance and other independent choreographers before founding 3rd Law Dance/Theater to perform her own work and the work of her collaborators.

Jim LaVita was born in Manhattan, and grew up in the Bed-Stuy section of Brooklyn. He eventually emigrated to Colorado, while spending a number of years living in Berkeley, California, and Austin, Texas, where he pursued interests in traditional and vernacular dance. Before producing and creating for 3rd Law, Jim worked in traditional, ethnic and vernacular dance as a dance ethnologist, choreographer, teacher and artistic consultant. He has studied, taught, lectured and written about traditional dance, its social settings, and its improvisatory techniques.

Jim has created, produced and directed original, narratively structured evening-length dance/theater works with his wife and principal collaborator, Katie Elliott, since 2001. He has created videoscapes and constructions for all those works as well as for company projects around the country. He also created and wrote the book for each of those works and is noted for thoughtful and provocative narrative lines for which 3rd Law is renowned. He has spoken at the Denver Art Museum and in numerous academic settings.

He formed and directed his own dance ensemble, NARODNO Ethnic Music and Dance Ensemble, and has set choreographies on a number of folk ensembles. Jim taught traditional and vernacular dancing nationally for more than two decades. He has given instruction and lecture demonstrations in traditional Scandinavian couple dancing throughout the West, Midwest and on the East Coast.

Jim received a Norwegian Marshall Fund Grant to study at the Rådet for folkemusikk og folkedans in Trondheim, Norway. He is Professor of Social Sciences and teaches courses in anthropology, digital media and theater in the Division of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Denver. Jim has a PhD (Anthropology) from the University of Texas, Austin, and an MA (Folklore) from the University of California, Berkeley.