Ann Carlson is  an  interdisciplinary artist, with an emphasis on choreography and performance.   Her award-winning  work  borrows from the disciplines of dance, theater, visual, conceptual and socially engaged art practices.   Taking  the form of solo performance, site-specific projects, ensemble dance, theatrical works, sculpture and performance/video, Carlson often works within a series format, creating   performance templates that adapt and tour to multiple sites.  Her works has been seen through-out the US, as well as in Mexico, Europe, Japan and the former Soviet Union. 

Carlson is the recipient of over thirty commissions and numerous awards for her artistic work. Her awards include: a Creative Capital Award, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, five Multi-Art Production Fund Grants, a USA Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Santa Monica Individual Artist Fellowship and a Fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art. She was an Artist Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship/Harvard University, a resident artist at the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center, Rauschenberg Foundation’s , Ucross Foundation, and Rockefeller’s Bellagio program. Carlson has received three awards from the National Choreographic Initiative; a Doris Duke Award for New Work; she received the first Cal/Arts Alpert Award in Choreography, and a prestigious three-year choreographic fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Carlson has been guest faculty/artist-in-residence at a number of universities; among them; Stanford, Princeton, and Wesleyan Universities, the University of Minnesota, University. of California at Riverside and is currently an adjunct faculty member at University of California at Los Angeles.