Ann Carlson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work borrows from the disciplines of dance and performance as well as visual, conceptual and social art practices. Carlson’s work takes the form of solo performance, large-scale site-specific projects, ensemble-stage based dances and performance video.  

Carlson often works in a series format, loosely organized into the Animals Series (interspecies performance collaborations) that to date  has included performances with dogs, chickens, kittens, turtle, goats, sheep, two works with horses  and a collaboration with a dairy cow. The People Series (dance / performance works made with and performed by people gathered together by a common profession, activity or shared passion) has included dances made with and performed by lawyers, security officers, nuns, anglers, teachers, custodians, physicians, gardeners, development directors, poker players) and also the Project Series  (large scale site specific performance installations, commissioned works for dance companies, galleries, museums, orchestras and collaborative performance videos). Carlson works from a “world as studio” aesthetic, cultivating and curating  the elements of everyday life as a way of exploring how to be together, how to be alone, in a world bound by and blended with  the more-than-human.

Ann’s work as a whole is engaged with flattening traditional hierarchies, and throwing off the guardrails of who gets access to participate and be immersed in the contemporary dance / art experience. Carlson builds conceptual frameworks that adapt and tour to multiple sites over a period of years, resulting in numerous iterations of a central strategy that culminates in a live performance; recent examples are The Symphonic Body, an orchestral work made entirely of gestures, Doggie Hamlet, a live performance spectacle in collaboration with herding dogs, sheep, and human performers. These Are the Ones We Fell Among is a stage based collaboration with Inkboat, built over zoom during the pandemic and adapted to live performance. Currently Carlson is collaborating with video maker, Mary Ellen Strom on Sink or Sing, (SoS) a site adaptive work in response to rising sea levels around the globe.

Carlson is the recipient of numerous awards for her artistic work. Her awards include a Creative Capital Award, a Doris Duke Award for Performing Artists, a National Dance Project Award, two American Masters awards, a USA Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, she is the recent recipient of a Fellowship from the Santa Monica Arts Council, multiple MapFund awards, numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Ann was the first recipient of the Cal/Arts Alpert Award in dance.

Carlson has a decades long collaboration with video maker / cultural scholar Mary Ellen Strom. Their performance video work is held in the public collections of Fonds Regional D’Art Contemporaire, (FRAC) Marseilles, France, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, The Rose Museum, at Brandeiss University, Waltham, MA. Carlson / Strom was awarded The St. Garden’s Prize in sculpture for their video, “Four Parallel lines”.

Carlson has been a visiting faculty member at numerous universities, among them, Wesleyan, Stanford, and Princeton University and currently is an adjunct professor at UCLA’s Dept. of World, Arts, Culture and Dance. Carlson lives in Santa Monica, California and Bozeman, Montana.