Our story

The story of PAI does not begin on a stage. It begins at a desk.

Katherine and Kimberly Corp graduated from Duke University in three years — not four — and in 1991 moved to Japan, where they lived, worked, and studied for years. They speak, read, and write Japanese fluently, a fluency earned not in a classroom but in daily life: in offices, graduate programs, and a culture that demands precision and respect in every interaction. It is a sensibility that has shaped everything they have built since.

In Japan, before they were dancers, they were desk workers — sitting 40 to 60 hours a week, logging the kind of sedentary hours that reshape a body from the inside out. They know what that feels like, not as an abstraction but as a physical memory: the tightened hip flexors, the rounded shoulders, the disconnection from a body that has spent its days folded into a chair. It was Pilates that brought them back. They came to the practice not as athletes looking to refine performance, but as people trying to rebuild it — to move from sitting shape into performing shape.

That transition — from desk to stage — is one most of the fitness industry ignores. Katherine and Kimberly have never ignored it. It is why PAI’s approach to the everyday body is different: because its founders have been that body. They understand the client who arrives at a Pilates session exhausted from hours at a screen, not because they’ve read about it, but because they’ve lived it.

The performing careers came after: as Radio City Rockettes, they spent years inside an institution that demands absolute precision — 36 women whose bodies must read as one. They understood, earlier than most, that uniformity on stage is an illusion built from individuality behind the curtain. Every Rockette’s body is different. The job is making the difference invisible.

After performing, both sisters continued their education — graduate degrees, years of advanced Pilates training under STOTT, and the cross-cultural perspective that comes from having built a life in two languages and two hemispheres. In 2000, they opened Pilates on Fifth in Manhattan. For six years, they taught side by side, watched the same bodies, and quietly built a method that accounted for what two sets of eyes could see that one could not.

Pilates Academy International was founded in January 2006 — not as a studio, but as a school. The distinction mattered from day one. PAI was built to teach teachers: to develop instructors who could read movement from every angle, on every body, without defaulting to their own.

Joseph Pilates called his work Contrology — the deliberate rule of the mind over a body that is never truly symmetrical. Bilateral symmetry, he understood, is a story the nervous system tells itself. Underneath it, every body is handed, eyed, footed, torqued. A great teacher doesn’t correct asymmetry. She teaches the student to read their own. Two teachers who could never agree on which side was “natural” were exactly the right people to build a curriculum that works for both.