Photo: Mike Taing

                Annalee Traylor is a freelance creator, choreographer, and director originally from Huntsville, AL.

 

                                   VISION 

 

Traylor's physically driven, tragicomic worlds house the paradoxical, emotionally focused characters who centralize her work. Audiences are transported to parallel, surrealistic realities where the extraordinary is illuminated - a lexicon of peculiarities revealed. 

 

The entangling of theatre and dance remains a fundamental fascination of hers. This interrogation of intersectionality elicits genre-bending, animatedly nuanced storytelling that emphatically challenges and plays with societal conventions. Perpetually guided by intuition and impulse, Traylor's practice is nourished by archetypal and emotive state-based research that is inextricably colored by her experience as a female from the American South.  She works interdisciplinarily with a variety of artists - it is through these meaningful, intimate, and shared collaborations that she is able to connect deeply to her understanding of why and how she tells the stories that she does. 

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HISTORY

 

Collectively, 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. In 2020, Traylor was awarded Outstanding Choreographer at the Youth American Grand Prix regionals. Annalee was chosen for Dance Lab NY's 2023 Summer Cycle, a virtual residency with Korzo Dance of The Hague, Netherlands.   

 

As an educator, Traylor 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.

 

 

                                                          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, where she was awarded the Nicole Marie Falbo Scholarship. Directly after, she went on to dance professionally with Pittsburgh's August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble (Top 25 to Watch in Dance Magazine) for three years before freelancing with various LA, NYC, and PGH companies including Pennington Dance Group, No)one Art House, Clairobscur Dance, Dolly Sfeir, and slowdanger among others. She is on faculty at the guiDANCE experience and holds a classical Pilates certification through Romana's Pilates.  In 2023, Annalee obtained an MFA in Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts with the S. Disney Lund Scholarship in Dance.