Cat Mahari creates work with personal and collective transformational possibilities. She is the founder and director of 31st&Brklyn, a platform for performance art and community engagement. In 2017 Ms. Mahari received a Charlotte Street Foundation Generative Performance Artist Fellow, won Jit Vs House, House 1 v1 in Detroit, MI; and premiered the solo mixtape series Violent/Break: Vol II, a semi-autobiographic video projection mapping performance that explores ontology of violence, fractures and transcendence. She is a 2x SEARCH grant awardee, 2008 Fulbright/Gilman Scholar, for her performance-as-research series on inter-connectivity between Merce Cunningham and breaking, presented at University of Missouri at Kansas City's Conservatory of Music and Dance, as part of the SEARCH Symposium (2007, 2009). The series explored street dance, chance procedure, film and movement technologies. She received a KCArts Inspiration Award for the interdisciplinary work The Projects (2010) which drew on the heterogeneity of city life at a business mall. the solo mixtape series Violent/Break premiered in London at the Brink Festival (2011). Vol I has been shown in London, Carei, and Toronto. Vol II received 2016 Lighton International Artist Exchange funding for travel and study Chen tai chi chuan in China. She is a recipient of St. Louis Regional Arts Commission Artist Support Grant (2013) and Andy Warhol Rocket Grant (2016) for The Floor, a site-specific performance and trans media study into traditions of partnered dance, Great Black Migration of WWII, and folk lore. The BAM! series began with Expectation of Violence/Rites due Spring: B-BAM! (2015) an immersive multi-media performance work, focusing on Blackness, America, and violence in Kansas City. Ms. Mahari, is a member of Chi-Buck, a Krump collective, and Gateway City Breakers, a hip hop crew, has a BFA in dance from UMKC, and a MA in Performance, Practice and Research from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.