In the early years of her career, Hook performed with Martha Graham luminaries Pearl Lang and Jean Erdman, later touring the world with Nikolais Dance Theater and subsequently with Nikolais/Louis Dance. The experiences of embodying the movement language and cultures of these companies affected her choreographic signature: the grandeur and full-bodied voluptuous movement of the Graham Technique and the dynamic, detailed textures and rhythms of Nikolais. The tensions of these two forms and her own subjecthood emerge in both a rebellious politic and multifaceted movement compulsions, expressed with candor. Her training in the worlds-apart techniques of Graham and Nikolais, and expertise as a somatic practitioner, result in a language of movement that is uniquely dense in detail. In 1994, Hook was the first American representative to the International Choreographer's Residency Program at the American Dance Festival (ADF), and the following year, received the Scripps ADF Humphrey-Weidman-Limón Choreography Fellowship, creating one of her most seminal works, Caucasian Spirituals, a searing, satirical spoof and homage to Helen Tamiris’s Negro Spirituals that lampooned American Christian fundamentalism. Caucasian Spirituals was later chosen for inclusion in the 1996 Fresh Tracks Series at Dance Theater Workshop (now called New York Live Arts) in New York City. Her work explores a high level of technical finesse and an appetite for exposing one’s physical and emotional vulnerabilities.  This rigor has attracted collaborators such as the late Mary Cochran, former principal of The Paul Taylor Dance Company who performed Hook’s work for 15 years in NYC venues including Joe’s Pub of the Public Theater, Dance Theater Workshop, and Symphony Space; and in numerous national venues including Harvard Dance Center and the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. Hook has made several works with David Parker and The Bang Group that toured extensively, including to the Holland Dance Festival and venues in Italy and Slovakia. Hook also collaborated with Paul Matteson, former Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane Dance Company dancer, making an evening length work entitled Bored House Guests (2014), a contemporary reckoning with the conceits of the balletic pas de deux, which premiered to sold-out houses at the West End Theater in NYC and garnered acclaim by critics Deborah Jowitt and Maura Donahue.

Hook holds a BFA from the North Carolina School of the Arts, has an MFA from New York University, and is a certified movement analyst from the Laban Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She has toured widely as a guest artist and has taught at the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center, Princeton University, Paul Taylor Dance Company Summer Intensives, and the Bates Dance Festival, and is now a Professor and Head of the Department of Dance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As former Interim Chair and Director of the MFA Program, Hook has contributed to the national prominence of the department, receiving several prestigious awards including an Arnold O. Beckman Research Board Grant in 2004, a College of Fine and Applied Arts Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2010, and a Campus Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentoring in 2020. In 2017, Hook became a Master Teacher for The Academy for Teachers which organizes master classes and other events that bring New York City’s teachers together with “our culture’s most brilliant and creative minds.” Other master teachers in this academy include Stephen Sondheim, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Billy Collins, Gloria Steinem, and Meredith Monk. Hook was a founding director of the Pink Ribbons Project, Dancers in Motion Against Breast Cancer and a board member of The Gender Project, an organization promoting discussion about gender issues in dance.