Dr Catie Cuan
In March 2025, I photographed Dr. Catie Cuan, a rare kind of technologist—one who does not merely study movement but inhabits it, shaping our understanding of both human and robotic motion in ways that feel at once inevitable and revolutionary. To witness her at work is to see someone in deep conversation with machines, coaxing out a language of movement that is not just efficient but expressive, not just technical but emotional.
A trained dancer and mechanical engineer, Cuan is a pioneer in ‘choreorobotics,’ a field that merges artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and art. Her career has been a dance in itself, moving fluidly between performance, research, and entrepreneurship, all in pursuit of a singular question: how can robots move in a way that feels alive?
Cuan holds a PhD and a Master’s of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she is also a postdoctoral researcher leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center. Her dissertation, “Compelling Robot Behaviors through Supervised Learning and Choreorobotics,” explores how machine learning can teach robots to move in ways that evoke presence—where motion itself carries meaning. During her doctoral research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Stanford University, she led the first multi-robot machine learning project at Everyday Robots (Google X) and Robotics at Google, now part of Google DeepMind.
But Cuan is not content to leave her work in the realm of academia. She has spent years choreographing robots, treating them not as rigid automatons but as performers capable of communicating through motion. She has held residencies at the Smithsonian, the Exploratorium, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, TED, Everyday Robots (Google X), the RAD Lab, and ThoughtWorks Arts, working with nearly a dozen different robotic platforms—from the industrial ABB IRB 6700 to small, interactive tabletop machines. Her performances reimagine robots not as servants or tools, but as collaborators, capable of moving with grace, intention, and even artistry.
Cuan’s vision is as much about rethinking robotics as it is about rethinking humanity’s relationship to machines. Her work suggests that the way a robot moves can influence the way we feel about it—that movement is not just a function of engineering but of psychology, of storytelling, of something deeply embedded in how we perceive life itself. In healthcare, she envisions robots that move with a bedside manner, adjusting their motion to put patients at ease. In entertainment, she imagines robots that can dance, that can anticipate and respond to human motion as a partner rather than an operator. Her work, at its core, is about breaking down the binary between the organic and the artificial.
Photographing Cuan, I saw someone who carries these ideas not just in her mind but in her body. Her own movements are precise yet fluid, deliberate yet spontaneous, as though she is always attuned to the forces of motion around her. In that moment, it was clear: she is not just designing how robots move—she is teaching them how to be seen, how to be understood, how to exist in a world that has, until now, only made space for the living.
Dr Catie Cuan
In March 2025, I photographed Dr. Catie Cuan, a rare kind of technologist—one who does not merely study movement but inhabits it, shaping our understanding of both human and robotic motion in ways that feel at once inevitable and revolutionary. To witness her at work is to see someone in deep conversation with machines, coaxing out a language of movement that is not just efficient but expressive, not just technical but emotional.
A trained dancer and mechanical engineer, Cuan is a pioneer in ‘choreorobotics,’ a field that merges artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and art. Her career has been a dance in itself, moving fluidly between performance, research, and entrepreneurship, all in pursuit of a singular question: how can robots move in a way that feels alive?
Cuan holds a PhD and a Master’s of Science in robotics and AI from Stanford, where she is also a postdoctoral researcher leading the art and robotics efforts at the new Stanford Robotics Center. Her dissertation, “Compelling Robot Behaviors through Supervised Learning and Choreorobotics,” explores how machine learning can teach robots to move in ways that evoke presence—where motion itself carries meaning. During her doctoral research, funded by the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Stanford University, she led the first multi-robot machine learning project at Everyday Robots (Google X) and Robotics at Google, now part of Google DeepMind.
But Cuan is not content to leave her work in the realm of academia. She has spent years choreographing robots, treating them not as rigid automatons but as performers capable of communicating through motion. She has held residencies at the Smithsonian, the Exploratorium, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, TED, Everyday Robots (Google X), the RAD Lab, and ThoughtWorks Arts, working with nearly a dozen different robotic platforms—from the industrial ABB IRB 6700 to small, interactive tabletop machines. Her performances reimagine robots not as servants or tools, but as collaborators, capable of moving with grace, intention, and even artistry.
Cuan’s vision is as much about rethinking robotics as it is about rethinking humanity’s relationship to machines. Her work suggests that the way a robot moves can influence the way we feel about it—that movement is not just a function of engineering but of psychology, of storytelling, of something deeply embedded in how we perceive life itself. In healthcare, she envisions robots that move with a bedside manner, adjusting their motion to put patients at ease. In entertainment, she imagines robots that can dance, that can anticipate and respond to human motion as a partner rather than an operator. Her work, at its core, is about breaking down the binary between the organic and the artificial.
Photographing Cuan, I saw someone who carries these ideas not just in her mind but in her body. Her own movements are precise yet fluid, deliberate yet spontaneous, as though she is always attuned to the forces of motion around her. In that moment, it was clear: she is not just designing how robots move—she is teaching them how to be seen, how to be understood, how to exist in a world that has, until now, only made space for the living.