VISION

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For Traylor, creating is a practice of listening—to intuition, to others, and to the shared presence that emerges through making and experiencing performance together. It is a way of listening for what cannot be fully known; a conversation with the mysteries that accompany being alive.

 

Across dance, theater, sound, and stagecraft, Traylor devises performances that interrupt perception and defamiliarize the ordinary. The tragicomic worlds she constructs with collaborators are inhabited by idiosyncratic characters and driven by situations where contradiction and symbolism accumulate. The quotidian becomes a point of departure into the absurd, grotesque, and entropic. As situations unravel, everyone remains together inside something intimate and hard to name. ​​​

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HISTORY

 

Traylor’s choreography and directing work has been commissioned and presented throughout the United States and internationally, including in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Her work has been presented at venues including Battery Park, Green Space, Hudson Guild Theatre, New Hazlett Theatre, Ailey Citigroup Theater, Diavolo, Ferst Center for the Arts, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, and Highways Performance Space, among others. Recent commissions include Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Kit Modus, Terminus Modern Ballet Theatre, and Theater Emory. Her work has been supported by residencies through The Goat Farm, Dance Lab NY, the UNCSA Choreographic Institute, Highways Performance Space, Kennesaw State University, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Dance Gallery Festival, and Emory University, where she received the inaugural 2023–24 Emory Arts Fellowship in Dance.​

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EDUCATION​

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As an educator, Traylor approaches the classroom as a laboratory—an active space for critical dialogue, experimentation, risk-taking, and collective discovery. She encourages students to cultivate curiosity, confidence, and an attunement to presence while developing their own creative voices. In 2026, she piloted Movement & Theatricality, a creative practice course bringing together theater and dance students at Western Michigan University, where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor. Her guest teaching credits include UNCSA Summer Dance, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, Reinhardt University, Core Dance, California Institute of the Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, Sam Houston State University, Point Park University, DeKalb School of the Arts, and Pittsburgh CAPA.

 

 

                                                              BIOGRAPHY

 

Originally from Huntsville, Alabama, Annalee Traylor is the daughter of two artists — a musician and a dancer — who nurtured and supported her creative life from an early age. She attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts and received her high school diploma from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Traylor earned her BFA, cum laude, from Point Park University.

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Following graduation, she joined Pittsburgh’s August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble for three years before freelancing with companies including Pennington Dance Group, Clairobscur Dance, and slowdanger, among others. She later received her MFA in Choreography from California Institute of the Arts as a recipient of the S. Disney Lund Scholarship in Dance. She holds a classical Pilates certification through Romana’s Pilates.