Choreographers

Ann Carlson

From the concert hall to the dairy farm, the opera house to a mountainside, in the museum or on a frozen pond, Ann Carlson's award winning work defies description and category while expanding the context of choreography and performance. Carlson borrows from the disciplines of dance, performance, theater, visual and conceptual art and often dismantles conventional boundaries between artist and subject. Ann's work takes the form of solo performance, site-specific projects, ensemble theatrical works, and performance/video. Carlson is the recipient of over thirty commissions and numerous awards for her artistic work. She often works within a series format, (animals, white, real people, night light) creating socially engaged performance structures over a period of years that adapt to multiple sites. Carlson is adept at working with a wild variety of people. Whether lawyers, security guards, fly-fisherman, ranchers, ballet dancers, professors, or gardeners, the work delves into the heart of what constitutes dance and performance and takes up the biases and boundaries, stereotypes and striations of contemporary culture. 

Carlson’s awards include; American Masters, Creative Capital’s MAPfund, a Rockefeller Seed Grant, a USA Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; A Fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She was an artist fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship/Harvard University, and at Stanford University’s Humanities Center. Ann has received three awards from the National Choreographic Initiative; a Doris Duke Award for New Work; the first Cal/Arts Alpert Award in Choreography, a prestigious three-year choreographic fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as eight years of consecutive support from the NEA. In 2013, Carlson was invited by the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to be in residence on Captiva Island, Florida. Carlson has made a number of performance works with live animals. Horses, dogs, cats, cows, fish, goats have made their way into works by Carlson. Carlson recently made a third work on horseback opposite a Debra Butterfield sculpture in Jackson Hole, WY. Her current project, “Doggie Hamlet” is a performance with a herding dog, a flock of sheep and four human performers. Carlson has had a long-term collaboration with video maker, Mary Ellen Strom resulting in several single channel performance videos that are held in several private and museum collections. In addition Carlson/Strom made several site-specific works, including the large-scale work, Geyserland, in which the audience boarded on a train and traveled 25 miles over the Bozeman Pass in Montana. For the past three years Carlson has been a guest artist at Stanford University. Stanford was both the site and inspiration of Carlson’s newest work, The Symphonic Body, a performance/orchestral work made entirely of gestures. The Symphonic Body will have its second incarnation on UCLA’s campus in November 2015.

Ms. Carlson has taught choreography and performance in number universities around the U.S., including Stanford University, Princeton University, and University of California at Riverside, University of Minnesota and Wesleyan University. Carlson will be a visiting artist at UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance and a guest faculty member of World Arts and Culture/Dance in the coming academic year. In the spring, 2015, Carlson will be in residence at University of California at Berkeley, re-mounting the 1990 work, Flag for the Berkeley Dance Project.


Jo Kreiter

Jo Kreiter is a San Francisco-based choreographer with a background in political science. She thrives at the intersection of social justice and acrobatic spectacle. Through dance she engages imagination, physical innovation and the political conflicts we live within. She founded her company, Flyaway Productions, in 1996. Kreiter/Flyaway is a recipient of a two 2014 Isadora Duncan Awards for company performance and choreography, a 2013 grant for artistic innovation from the Center for Cultural Innovation, a 2013 Sandbox Residency at ODC Common, a 2013 Artist Investigator Award from California Shakespeare Company, a 2012 Chime award, 2009 IZZY Award for Special Achievement and a Bay Guardian GOLDIE Award.

As well as running her own teaching programs, GIRLFLY and KIDFLY, Kreiter has taught workshops highlighting her unique approach to inverted motion at Stanford, Duke, Nevada, Sonoma State, Ohio State, and Arizona State Universities, the Colorado Aerial Dance Festival and the University of San Francisco. Her articles have been published in Aerial Dance, Contact Quarterly, In Dance, STREET ART San Francisco, andSite Dance — the first book written on contemporary site specific performance.

“In the last several years, I have created work from broad notions of art as a catalyst for change. I have tried to bring the beauty of bodies in motion to discarded city streets; I have tried to bring the eye of the city onto an abandoned crane, to help turn it into a labor landmark. I have focused in on the subtlety of human despair. I have honored the power of dissent as a crucial political and cultural tradition, celebrating the tender underside of Market Street’s protest history. I have asked the city of San Francisco to remember its painful history of arson and have offered the body in flight as a hopeful image of transformation. After all these years of dance-making I value both the scale and marvel of site specific work and the intimacy of the theater stage.”


Lisa Wymore


Lisa Wymore performed her graduate study at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where she was awarded a Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship, an Outstanding Achievement Award, and a Moe Family Award for her creativity. After graduating with an M.F.A. in Dance in 1998, she moved to Chicago and began her career as a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. She was a faculty member within the Northwestern University Dance Program from 2000 to 2004, where she worked as the Faculty Advisor for the Northwestern University Dance Ensemble, as the touring and outreach facilitator of the Dance Program, and twice as the Co-Artistic Director for Danceworks, the annual Northwestern University faculty choreographed concert. Wymore has been awarded twice by the Illinois Arts Council Fellowships for her choreography. She has also been awarded several Community Arts Assistant Program Grants from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. In January 2004, she was invited to travel to Vietnam to work on a project entitled Artistic Voices Across Cultures in Collaboration. Wymore is now an Associate Professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. She teaches classes in choreography, dance technique, pedagogy, improvisation, and performance.

Professor Wymore is Co-Artistic Director of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts with Sheldon B. Smith. The company creates multimedia dance theater works and experimental performances. Their work has been presented and hosted by numerous national and international festivals including: the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art Summer Solstice Celebration, Dance Chicago, the Performing Arts Chicago PAC/edge Festival, the Dublin Fringe Festival, the Minneapolis Spark Festival, the Earagail Arts Festival in Donegal, Ireland, the [Kon.[Text]] Symposium in Zurich, Switzerland, and the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music (STEIM) in Amsterdam. Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts has won numerous awards including Best Interdisciplinary Performance and Best Use of Technology at the Chicago PAC/Edge Festival 2004 and was nominated for two 2006 Isadora Duncan awards (San Francisco Dance Awards) for Best Choreography and Best Design. Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts is currently working on a project entitled Number Zero, which explores body computer augmented performance interfacing with explorations around body memory, sensation, power, and perception. For more information please see the Disappearing Acts’ website: http://smithwymore.org/


Professor Wymore started a multi-disciplinary project called The Resonance Project in 2005, which has evolved into the Z-Lab UC Berkeley – a site for interactive real time collaboration. This project involves choreographers, computer engineers, and visual/sound artists who are investigating presence/co-presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. For more information follow the Z-Lab blog:http://zlabucb.blogspot.com Other recent projects spear headed by Professor Wymore include: Parking Space, a site-specific community based dance performance which took place in a local parking lot in the city of Los Banos, California in June 2007. And more recently Professor Wymore was invited to participate in the Urban Bush Women Summer Leadership Institute in New Orleans that had the theme of Soul Deep: Why are People Poor? Demystifying the Opportunity Gap in America. From this experience she worked with TDPS colleague Amara Tabor-Smith and former Urban Bush Women member and Leadership Institute Facilitator Paloma McGregor to create a five-week long residency within the department. The residency culminated in a series of performances entitled From the Field to the Table. It centered on food justice issues and community art making practices. For more information, visit the blog that Professor Wymore created for this project: http://fromthefieldtothetable.blogspot.com

Wymore is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst from the Integrated Movement Studies program. She regularly teaches workshops and classes in this system. She is one of the Co-Founders of the Townsend Center Dance Studies Working Group. For the past three years she has been honored to be an organizer of Indigenous Peoples’ Day Celebration in the Bancroft Studio – a daylong series of events, performances, talks, and participatory activities honoring California Native Americans and indigenous peoples from around the world.