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.

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 often works in a series format, loosely organized into interspecies performance collaborations, dance / performance works made with and performed by people gathered together by a common profession, activity or shared passion and 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.

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 long-time collaboration with visual artist Mary Ellen Strom. Their current project, SoS, is a site adaptive work in response to flooding and rising sea levels around the globe. Carlson/Strom’s 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 thrilled to be an adjunct professor at UCLA’s Dept. of World, Arts, Culture and Dance. Carlson lives in Los Angeles, California and Bozeman, Montana.

Photo credit: Michael Poole