Kathleen McGuire Gaines is a former dancer, a writer, and a mental health advocate for dancers.
As a dancer Kathleen trained at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School and the San Francisco Ballet School in their pre-professional divisions. She also spent summers at the School of American Ballet and the Chautauqua Festival program.
Over the last 10 years, Kathleen has written more than 150 articles on dance for Dance Magazine, Pointe, Dance Spirit, and Dance Teacher magazines.
In 2017 she created Minding the Gap, in response to the outpouring of support Kathleen received after she posted the article Why are we still so bad at addressing dancers' mental health on the Dance Magazine website. Her ambition is to enact a movement which results in mental health being regarded with the same seriousness as physical health in dance culture.