With parents who were a professional ballroom dancing team and a paternal grandfather who was a tap dancer in vaudeville, Pat Catterson doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t dance. Born in Indianapolis, she moved to NYC in 1968 and that fall her work was chosen for the annual Clark Center New Choreographers Concert. Then, in 1970, she presented her first full evening of choreography at Judson Church. Subsequently she has choreographed over a hundred  works and received many accolades. A 1996 Fulbright scholar, she has received multiple grants from National Endowment for the Arts, the CAPS Program, the Harkness Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Bridge Fund and, in 2011, she was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Choreography Fellowship. For their 2022-2023 season, she was a Resident Artist at  La MaMa Experimental Theatre in NYC. In 2020, her online video work Project 114/Many in One, was included in the live streamed Festival Jauriasdel Mundo from Buenos Aires Argentina.

Companies, individual dancers and schools have commissioned her work, including the Seattle Dance Project, Salt Lake’s Repertory Dance Theatre, Dance Theatre of Oregon, the Eglevsky Ballet Company, the Turku School of Art and Communication in Finland, and Adelphi, Hofstra, Ohio and Virginia Commonwealth Universities, She has choreographed six times for the “Fame” School. NYC’s LaGuardia High School for Music and Art & the Performing Arts. She was a Dance Consultant for the feature film.” I Shot Andy Warhol” and Off-Off Broadway shows such as “Phenom.”

She has made all sizes and kinds of dances from “Crowd Pleaser” for thirty eight dancers to her critically acclaimed series of fourteen solo dance portraits, "Please, Just Take It One Life at A Time,” from  “Project 111” and “Project 112”, solos seen only online, to  NOW. which paired dancers in nine other countries with NYC dancers, live via Skype. She has made dances on rooftops, on grass, on stages, a 25 foot verticla ladder, on an ironing board, modern ones, tap dances and blends of both, hilarious dances and very dramatic ones and those that walk a fine line between. She has collaborated with composers, photographers, a laser sculptor and other choreographers.

A dedicated educator, she has been on the faculties at Sarah Lawrence College, UCLA, the Juilliard School, and the Merce Cunningham Studio, among many others. For twenty years she taught her own tap classes in NYC and has been a guest artist all over the US and in Europe, most recently at University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, CNDC in Angers France and at the Kalamata Dance Festival in Greece. Her writing has been published in the Weld Company Book  “No Talking No Props,” Ballet Review, JOPERD, Attitude Magazine, Dance Magazine Online, the Getty Iris, and the Dance Research Journal. She earned her BA in psychology and philosophy from Northwestern University and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College.

She first performed Yvonne Rainer’s work in 1969 and since 1999 has worked as her dancer, rehearsal assistant, as well as custodian of Rainer’s early works, touring nationally and internationally. She retired from performing in 2018 but continues as Rainer’s Rehearsal Assistant and reconstructor of her works, most recently for the Weld Company in Stockholm, the Stephen Petronio Company and Barnard College.

Her most influential teachers were Merce Cunningham and Viola Farber for modern, Margaret Hills and Jocelyn Lorenz for ballet, Charles  "Cooky" Cook and Honi Coles for tap and Martha Myers and Bessie Schönberg for composition.