Ann Carlson

Ann Carlson (born October 21, 1954) is an American dancer, choreographer, and performance artist whose work explores contemporary social issues. She has performed throughout the United States and internationally and has won a number of awards.

Beginnings in dance Carlson was born in Park Ridge, Illinois. She graduated magna cum laude with a BFA in modern dance from the University of Utah in 1976. In 1983 she became one of the first students of the University of Arizona to earn a graduate degree in dance. Even though Carlson received extensive dance training as a child, she defined dance as "any conscious movement in time and space".

Career In the early part of her dance career, from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Carlson performed with Territory Dance Theater in Tucson, Arizona, and later, when she moved to New York in 1984, performed with Susan Rethorst and Meredith Monk. A 2017 work by the artist entitled "Doggie Hamlet," which included "five performers, three herding dogs, a dog handler, a dog trainer and a flock of sheep," was performed in a meadow at dusk.

As a choreographer, Carlson’s work has been performed throughout the United States; some notable places her choreography has been featured include Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles. Her work often incorporates different movement components, speaking or acting components, and props or sometimes animals. A piece entitled The Dog Inside the Man Inside represents all these areas of Carlson’s work and is from a series of work called Animals. The setup of this piece includes a straight chair, a television set, a white picket fence, and, most notably, a real live dog. Other animals are later featured, including a goldfish, a cat and a goat. Carlson said she wanted "to make works that could respond to a living being, that I couldn’t choreograph in the way that I’d been taught to choreograph".