Hetty is a native New Yorker born on the lower east side of Manhattan and raised by artists in Brooklyn. She has been a contributor to the NYC dance and performance world as a performer, choreographer, dance educator, writer, and scholar since she graduated from the High School of the Performing Arts in 1982. Her choreography and performance work has been presented in NYC and across Canada and has been awarded three Jerome Foundation Commission Grants, 2000,1999 & 1997, and a grant from the US/Mexico Fund for Culture, Rockefeller Foundation, 1999. As a performer, she danced in numerous contemporary dance companies including Ralph Lemon, Victoria Marks, Bill Young, and David Dorfman. In 2000 Hetty was awarded the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in Arts and Humanities, Dance and began her career transition. First, as a student in the MFA program at the Peck School of the Arts, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and then in the MA program in Performance Studies at NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She then entered the field of dance education first as a teaching artist with Lincoln Center Institute and then as a licensed NYS Dance Educator, Prek-12 (if you ever get the chance to ask her about her path to being licensed, ask - it is a unique story!) As a dance educator Hetty has worked in public and private schools, senior homes, mental facilities, and afterschool programs. Over the past twenty years, she has developed and taught dance programs for PreK-12 that focus on creative movement, student-driven choreography, and an awareness of self, others, and the environment through movement.

From 1990-1998 Hetty was a devoted student of the late somatic movement pioneer Nancy Topf. Hetty’s time with Nancy was immersive; it included classes, workshops, summer retreats, and private sessions. She is certified by Nancy in Topf Technique/Dynamic Anatomy® as one of the five inaugural students. Her CMA (certified movement analyst) thesis paper in 1996- “When Your Arms Are Free You Can Fly” is an LMA analysis of Nancy’s work and in 2003 her MA thesis paper in Performance Studies at NYU - THE INTERVENTION OF TOPF TECHNIQUE – a shift from movement to the body discussed Topf Technique/Dynamic Anatomy® as a transformative practice that moves feeling into action and thought into motion becoming an exploration of the subjectivity of the body. This exploration leads to dancing not about movement or meaning, but about the body. She proposed a theoretical framework for an investigation of the substance of dance utilizing skeletal anatomy to initiate the process of creating images as entrances into the body; transferring manipulation as a way of creating movement through imitation and coercion, to awareness and observation of movement present. 

When Nancy passed in 1998 she left Hetty the rough draft of her manuscript. At long last it is complete - A Guidebook To A Somatic Movement Practice: The Anatomy of Center by Nancy Topf, with Hetty King published by the University Press of Florida is now available. Through TT® Hetty’s work as an artist and teacher was profoundly changed. It nurtured a deep love of the somatic arts and their potential to affect change in the fields of dance, dance education, and the education of the whole child.

Hetty is a doctoral student working on her EdD in dance education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her dissertation—The Possibilities of a Somatic Movement Education Pedagogy for the Early Childhood Dance Education Class—an Inclusion of ‘Personal Literacy’ through Dance Education, is in process. She is the full-time Dance Educator for grades 3K-5th at PS 145 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and a coach with PreK CREATE, a professional development project with DEL (Dance Education Laboratory) and the DOE (Department of Education).

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a theatre technician at the Metropolitan Opera, their two adopted daughters, and one cat.