While earning degrees in dance and Spanish from the University of Maryland College Park, Andrea taught and performed with Seize the Day! mixed abilities performance company. She continued to perform, and teach mixed-ability dance classes with them for 10 years. Burkholder performed and collaborated with numerous artists throughout the DC region, including Deborah Riley, Leonard Wood, and This Body This Earth, before becoming a founding member of Baltimore’s Air Dance Bernasconi in 2000. 

Also in 2000, Andrea was certified in Pilates by Romana Kryzanowska and Pilates, Inc. and opened Pure Joe Pilates Studios in Reston, VA, and Washington, DC. Click here for more information on her Pilates experience.

In 2003, she co-founded DC’s Arachne Aerial Arts. Having created over 20 unique works and 10 full length shows, Arachne performed in museums, theaters, pavilions and backyards for over 10 years. Past venues include Dance Place, The John F.Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Woolly Mammoth Theatre in the inaugural Capital Fringe Festival, The Alley Aerial Festival, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and many more. Andrea has also collaborated with a number of multi-disciplined artists in many of her performances and projects.

Andrea attended several years of the Aerial Dance Festival in Boulder, Colorado, and has trained extensively with Serenity Smith Forchion of the New England Center for Circus Arts in aerial partnering and in aerial teaching techniques.

Andrea, a highly regarded teacher of Pilates, aerial arts and choreography, has created her own somatic based aerial technique classes, which she has taught through Elevate Studios and Movement Arts in Maryland and at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.