DeAnna Pellecchia is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer, choreographer, and founder/artistic director of KAIROS Dance Theater. For more than twenty-five years, she has created visceral, immersive performance worlds that invite audiences into time-bending truths, connecting the immediate to the infinite, the ancestral, and the universal. Defined by rigorous physicality, fearless embodiment, and emotional vulnerability, her interdisciplinary works unfold as nonlinear story mosaics, weaving together dance, light, live music, visual art, memory, and myth. Her practice is rooted in somatic methodologies, Deep Listening®, and an intensely collaborative creative process, transforming performance into rituals of reckoning, resistance, and radical empathy.

A graduate of Roger Williams University (B.A., Dance/Performance), Pellecchia has toured nationally and internationally as a principal dancer with Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works, Kinodance Company, Anikaya Dance Theater, Anna Myer & Dancers, and others, and appeared as a guest artist in works by Ann Carlson, Elaine Summers, and Heidi Latsky. Her teaching career spans professional and academic settings, including Boston University, Boston Ballet, Boston Conservatory, Mount Holyoke College, National School of Drama (India), and Evolution Dance Project (Russia).

Her work has been commissioned and presented throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia by the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, Global Arts Live, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Greenway in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts/Boston, Jazz at Lincoln Center (NYC), Southern Theater (Minneapolis), 7 Stages (Atlanta), Busan Biennale (South Korea), Compass Theater (Russia), ZOU Arts (France), and others.

Under Pellecchia’s direction, KAIROS has grown into one of Boston’s leading interdisciplinary performance companies, earning more than twenty Boston Globe Critics’ Picks alongside five-star reviews, festival awards, and critical distinctions across the country. The company has been awarded numerous residencies at universities and cultural institutions throughout New England, and garnered support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Boston Cultural Council, New England Foundation for the Arts, WS Development, The Marcus Foundation, and The Boston Foundation.

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Project Statement

MotherLoad is a new interdisciplinary work by KAIROS Dance Theater for dancers and live musicians, exploring inheritance, maternal lineage, and the radical power of care. Taking its working title from the album by cellist Dave Eggar, clarinetist Tasha Warren, and guitarist Phil Faconti, the project draws from music composed through the lived experiences of artists navigating motherhood—its demands, sacrifices, and profound acts of love.

For choreographer DeAnna Pellecchia, whose creative life has been marked by the loss of her mother, MotherLoad opens into a broader inquiry: what do we inherit from those who mother us? What wisdom, knowledge, and tenderness survive across generations, and what is lost when those ways of knowing are devalued? Rather than treating motherhood as sentiment or stereotype, MotherLoad explores the maternal as a source of intelligence, ferocity, continuity, and social architecture.

Through KAIROS’s collaborative, interdisciplinary process, MotherLoad will be shaped by the performers’ varied cultural lineages and personal histories. Building on KAIROS’s previous collaboration with Eggar, Warren, and Faconti, the work will deepen the relationship between dancers and musicians, creating a fluid world of physical, musical, and artistic exchange while asking what becomes possible when care is recognized as one of humanity’s original forms of power.