by Emma Fiona Jones

“I need a chamber with a view of the sky and a door that closes,” Josie Bettman ’17 reads into the thin white cord of her earbuds, looking up from the script grasped in one hand. The video, originally presented as a livestream for POUSH, a multidisciplinary arts space in a Paris suburb, is part of a project that has been brewing since her first Catwalk residency in summer 2024.

Bettman, a New York-based choreographer and performance artist, graduated from Vassar with a degree in art history and earned her MFA in experimental choreography at UC Riverside. She went on to present her work around New York City at PAGEANT, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Cathy Weis Projects, Bossa Nova Civic Club, and Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, and at Dripping festival in Sparta, New Jersey.

In her practice, movement serves as a way of filtering information and a means of telling stories that evade language.

She arrived at Catwalk seeking a place to make work that “can feel too playful or risky to attempt elsewhere.” And she found it. Out of that summer came the first draft and the overall contour of a short film, which she continued to develop during her second Catwalk residency in winter 2026.

The intensity of this second residency provided the perfect conditions to move her project forward. “I was there during the first of this past winter’s epic storms,” she says. “It was so cold, and the snow was so relentless.” While Chuck Irwin, the property manager, plowed and shoveled through the night, Bettman baked a loaf of bread for him in the warmth of the Tower. “The drama of frigid temperatures and cascading drifts of snow coincided with a total hush—things became very ‘Overlook Hotel’ quite quickly,” Bettman remarks.

In the midst of the blizzard, she raced to finish a draft and shoot a livestream with multiple cameras. “I ended up in a closed-loop workflow, trudging back and forth wearing this dramatic white coat between the Tower apartment and the Garage Studio, finding an immediacy between composition and production that’s only possible under conditions of total immersion,” she says.

Then this past spring, Tilhenn Klapper, an artist who was an exchange student at Vassar when Bettman met her, invited her to participate in an open studio event at POUSH. She responded with allegory of the cyclorama: TEST, which oscillates between clips of Bettman reading from a script, shots of a partially demolished building she is considering as the site of a future project, and crabs slithering through the surf on a beach at night.

Though the script remains in flux, this state of endless transformation is intrinsic to Bettman’s work. The tension between the impulse to create freely and the responsibility to maintain a consistent practice is ever-present. “Having a reprieve from the fraught formula of daily life,” she explains, gave her space to “measure how the shape, force, and momentum of a story sweeps through my body as it crashes ashore.”

The “slow peacefulness” of Catwalk has allowed her to bring an element of intentionality into her everyday practice. As a maturing artist, Bettman says, she now strives to have the faith to let something generate slowly, “seeking something more subtle that maybe doesn’t have such an urgent need for an audience to witness it.”

This bears fruit in allegory of the cyclorama: TEST: “The room was coming to me as a feeling in my dreams … an intense pressure on all sides looming over a hollow core, a warning that the meticulously studied exoskeleton was wearing thin.”

From that first summer and frigid winter at Catwalk came not just a fleeting respite, but a blueprint for sustained self-discovery.

“At Catwalk, I realized I can find myself even without knowing the way—and perhaps bring you along too,” says Bettman. “I’m putting together a methodology that sustains space for dreaming, and doesn’t insist so emphatically upon resolving itself.”