Photo: Mike Taing

             annalee traylor is a freelance creator, choreographer, director, and educator originally from Huntsville, AL.

 

                                        VISION 

 

Traylor's physically driven, tragicomic worlds house the paradoxical, emotionally focused characters who centralize her work. Distinctively situational, flecked with irony and symbolism, her work is anthropological in nature, heavily relational, and often engages the quotidian as a departure point to unearth the unpredictable, eccentric, and idiosyncratic.  

 

The entangling of dance and theatre remains a fundamental fascination of hers. She finds this interrogation of intersectionality elicits genre-bending, animatedly nuanced storytelling that emphatically challenges and plays with societal conventions. Currently, she is conducting research on elements of clown, mime, and devised absurdist theater for her upcoming project as Arts Fellow at Emory University. 

 

Perpetually guided by intuition and curiosity, Traylor's creative praxis is nourished by interdisciplinary collaboration and anchored in highly physical, archetypal and state-based research that is inextricably colored by her experience as a female from the American South. Ultimately, she views her art as a continuous exploration of physical expressivity and its boundlessness to elucidate the human experience.

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HISTORY

 

Traylor's work has been presented nationally and abroad in LA, NYC, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Houston, Huntsville (TX), Seattle, Temecula, Brooklyn, Battle Lake, Durham, the Netherlands, Italy, and Portugal, and at venues including Battery Park, Green Space, Hudson Guild Theatre, 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 and awarded residencies through Kennesaw State University, The Dance Gallery Festival, Highways Performance Space, and Periapsis Music and Dance.  Other commissions include Texture Contemporary Ballet, REED Dance, Point Park University's International Summer Dance, Houston Contemporary II, Dance Canvas, and Voices Carry Inc. She was chosen for Dance Lab NY's 2023 Summer Cycle, a virtual residency with Korzo Dance of The Hague, Netherlands.   

 

In 2020, Traylor was awarded Outstanding Choreographer at the Youth American Grand Prix regionals. 

 

As an educator, she has facilitated master classes throughout the United States, at numerous summer intensives, and been on faculty at schools on the east and west coasts. She has been a teaching artist at CalArts, Carnegie Mellon University, Sam Houston State University, Point Park University, Dekalb School of the Arts, and The Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh among others. She on faculty at the guiDANCE experience and holds a classical Pilates certification through Romana's Pilates.

 

 

                                                          BIOGRAPHY

 

Annalee is the daughter of two artists, a musician and a dancer, who nurtured and supported her passion from an early age. She attended the Alabama School of Fine Arts and graduated high school from the North Carolina School of the Arts. Traylor obtained her BFA cum laude from Point Park University. Directly after, she joined Pittsburgh's August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble (Top 25 to Watch in Dance Magazine) for three years before freelancing with various companies including Pennington Dance Group, No)one Art House, Clairobscur Dance, Dolly Sfeir, and slowdanger among others. She obtained an MFA in Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts with the S. Disney Lund Scholarship in Dance.