Annalee TraylorEmory Arts Fellow, 2023-2024

MFA, choreography, California Institute of the Arts

Annalee Traylor is a creator, choreographer, director, and educator originally from Huntsville, AL. Traylor's tragicomic storytelling lives at the intersection of theatre and dance. Her practice is nourished by interdisciplinary collaboration and anchored in highly physical, archetypal, and state-based research.

 Traylor's work has been presented nationally and abroad in LA, NYC, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Houston, Seattle, Temecula, Brooklyn, Durham, the Netherlands, Italy, and Portugal, and at venues including Battery Park, Green Space, New Hazlett Theatre, Ailey Citigroup Theatre, Diavolo, Ferst Center for the Arts, Kelly Strayhorn Theatre, Gibney, and Highways Performance Space, among others. She has been commissioned by Kennesaw State University, Periapsis Music and Dance, Texture Contemporary Ballet, Point Park University's International Summer Dance, REED Dance, The Dance Gallery Festival, Houston Contemporary II, Dance Canvas, and Voices Carry Inc. Most recently, Traylor was chosen as a choreographer for Dance Lab NY, working virtually with artists of Korzo Theater in The Hague, Netherlands.

 A founding member of Pittsburgh's August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble (top 25 to watch, Dance Magazine), she has had the honor of working with some of the most illustrious choreographers of our time, including Kyle Abraham, Robert Battle, Sidra Bell, Camille A. Brown, Christopher Huggins, Kevin Iega Jeff, and Darrell Grand Moultrie. Her performance career also led her to work with No)one Art House, LA Rock Opera, BrockusRED, Clairobscur Dance, C. Eule Dance, Pennington Dance Group, slowdanger, and Dolly Sfeir.  

Her guest teaching credits include Carnegie Mellon University, Sam Houston State University, Point Park University, Slippery Rock University with the August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble, Dekalb School of the Arts, The Creative and Performing Arts High School (Pittsburgh), and the virtual international dance school, Ballet Together, among many other pre-professional programs, schools, and studios throughout the US.

Traylor is a high school graduate of UNCSA, received her BFA from Point Park University and MFA in Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts. She is also a certified Pilates instructor through Romana's Pilates.

My pedagogy is grounded in compassion, care, and community. I intentionally build supportive structures for students in which they feel safe enough to be challenged, fostering an experience that seeks to honor and instill confidence and focus, awaken imagination, and provoke attention to detail, musicality, and quality of movement. Cultivating an inclusive community culture serves as a foundation for critical and empathic engagement within the classroom. This environment empowers students to take agency, make bold choices, and develop a thoughtful, self-aware, and positive mindset in academic settings and the world at large. As an educator, I am fascinated with the innate human impulse to create. If I can impart one thing to my students, it is with their intrinsic creative ability and positive mentality; they can accomplish whatever they set their minds to - they are limitless.

I craft physically driven, tragicomic worlds that house the paradoxical, emotionally focused characters centralizing my work. Audiences are transported to surrealistic realities where the extraordinary is illuminated - a lexicon of peculiarities revealed. My work is situational and distinctive, inextricably colored by my experience as a female from the American South; it is flecked with irony and humor as I am particularly intrigued by these devices' capacities to provoke thought on contemporary issues. While dance remains a fundamental fascination of mine, interrogation of intersectionality elicits genre-bending, nuanced storytelling that emphatically challenges and plays with societal conventions.

Collaboration is vital to my pursuit and investment in art making. During graduate school, I continued developing a creative praxis in collaboratively devised movement with heightened theatricality. I have been fortunate to work with a diverse range of artists - dancers, actors, writers, musicians, cinematographers, composers, and designers, from a multiplicity of backgrounds regarding gender, sexuality, culture, heritage, and training. Together, we create work that entangles theater and stagecraft, centering diverse experiences and perspectives in our narratives. Through these stories, I am committed to pushing the boundaries and conceptions of what dance is and can be for our community and audiences alike.

THE COME BACK trailer from Annalee Traylor on Vimeo.

Night of the Falling Stars excerpt from Annalee Traylor on Vimeo.

romp trailer from Annalee Traylor on Vimeo.