Professional Biography

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 and conceptual art.   Taking  the form of solo performance, site-specific projects, ensemble dance, theatrical works, and performance/video, Carlson often works within a series format, creating  performance structures over a period of years that adapt and tour to multiple sites.  Carlson's work 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 2016 Creative Capital Award, 2015 Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in Contemporary Dance, five Multi-Art Production Fund Grants, a USA Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts 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 and at Stanford University’s Humanities Center. Carlson has received three awards from the National Choreographic Initiative; a Doris Duke Award for New Work; 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 University of California at Los Angeles, University of California at Riverside, Stanford University, Princeton University, Wesleyan University, University of Minnesota.