About Annie Dorsen

Annie Dorsen works in a variety of fields, including theatre, film, dance and, as of 2010, algorithmic theater. Most recently, Yesterday Tomorrow premiered at the Holland Festival (Amsterdam), and was presented at T2G (Gennevilliers) as part of Festival d'Automne, Théâtre La Garonne (Toulouse), MaerzMusik Festival (Berlin), Coil Festival at PS122 (NYC) and several others. Her previous algorithmic performance, A Piece of Work, premiered at On the Boards (Seattle) and was presented at BlackBox (Olso), BIT Teatergarasjen (Bergen) and brut (Vienna.) Hello Hi There premiered at the streirischer herbst festival (Graz), and was presented at Black Box, BIT Teatergarasjen, Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin) and PS122 (New York). She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which she also directed. Spike Lee has since made a film of her production of the piece, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, subsequently screened at South by Southwest Film Festival and The Tribeca Film Festival, and was released theatrically by IFC in 2010 before being broadcast on PBS' Great Performances. Also in 2010, she collaborated with choreographer Anne Juren on Magical (ImPulsTanz Festival Vienna, Side Step Festival Helsinki, Théatre de la Cité International Paris, Kampnagel Hamburg and others) and with Ms. Juren and DD Dorviller on Pièce Sans Paroles (brut Vienna and Rencontres Choréographiques Internationales Seine-St-Denis, Paris). In 2009 she created two music-theatre pieces, Ask Your Mama, a setting of Langston Hughes' 1962 poem, composed by Laura Karpman and sung by Jessye Norman and The Roots (Carnegie Hall) and ETHEL's Truckstop, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. Her pop-political performance project Democracy in America was presented at PS122 in spring 2008. Her short film, I Miss, originally the centerpiece of Democracy in America, screened at American Film Institute Festival (AFI Fest), SXSW Film Festival, The New York Film Festival's "Views From the Avant-Garde" and the Nantucket Film Festival.

In addition to numerous awards for Passing Strange, Dorsen received the 2014 Herb Alpert Award for the Arts in Theater and a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award. She is a Visiting Professor in Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago.