Ann Carlson

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Ann Carlson works as a choreographer, performer, director, and conceptual artist whose work is interdisciplinary, blending movement, text, voice, music, and visual elements. She creates solo works, choreographs ensemble works for dance companies, and works collaboratively to build large-scale, site-specific works. Most recently, Carlson completed Flesh, a performance/meditation for AXIS Dance Company of San Francisco, and a work-in-progress version of CAke.

Carlson will continue to work on the performance/installation CAke during her fellowship period. CAke looks at the source-to-use trajectory of everyday products. Through researching the gestures of labor and the global flow of production, Carlson will develop strategies for placing these ideas and the work that results into empty retail stores. CAke is intended to be a conceptual shopping experience that brings the people who labor to make goods into direct contact with the consumer. In collaboration with video artist Mary Ellen Strom, Carlson will continue to make movement-based video portraits of individual laborers. Carlson also intends to choreograph a movement choir based on the film footage of efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor and to build a solo work around the concept of money.

Carlson was a 2003 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in performance and choreography. She was awarded a fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance in 1999 and was the first choreographer to receive the CalArts/Alpert Award. Among other awards, Carlson is the recipient of a prestigious three-year choreographic fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.