Annie B Parson

Annie-B Parson is a defining contemporary dance-theater maker who has extended choreographic thinking from experimental ensemble performance into Broadway, opera, concerts, film, writing, and the movement of everyday life. Born in Chicago in 1958, Parson earned a B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.A. from Columbia University Teachers College, bringing that combination of dance practice and pedagogy into a teaching career that began at New York University's Experimental Theatre Wing in 1993.

In 1991, Parson co-founded Big Dance Theater with performer-director Paul Lazar and dancer-performer Molly Hickok. The company developed a collaborative form in which dance, speech, music, literature, video, and visual design operate as equally consequential materials. Its repertory has drawn on sources as different as Mark Twain, Gustave Flaubert, Euripides, Samuel Pepys, and Masuji Ibuse. Big Dance Theater received an Obie in 2000 and Bessie recognition in 2002 and 2010, while Parson herself received a Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography in 2007, the inaugural Jacob's Pillow Dance Award with Lazar in 2007, and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2012.

Parson carried her formal, gesture-centered approach into music and theater, choreographing David Byrne's 2008–09 tour with Brian Eno, the 2012 Love This Giant tour by Byrne and St. Vincent, and Here Lies Love—with music by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim—at the Public Theater, London's National Theatre, and later on Broadway. Her stage work expanded to collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov, Wendy Whelan, the Martha Graham Dance Company, David Bowie, Lorde, and many others while retaining a concern with how bodies, objects, and text share space. Her choreography and musical staging for David Byrne's American Utopia reached Broadway and was preserved in Spike Lee's film, which received a Special Tony Award.

Parson's recent work has moved across opera, books, and installations. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut as choreographer of The Hours in 2022—a work by composer Kevin Puts and librettist Greg Pierce, directed by Phelim McDermott—and later choreographed Antony and Cleopatra and Tristan und Isolde there. She published The Choreography of Everyday Life with Verso in October 2022, co-edited Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study with Thomas F. DeFrantz in 2024, and received a Tony nomination for Best Choreography for Here Lies Love in 2024. In 2025, she created a gathering dance for the opening of Jacob's Pillow's new Doris Duke Theatre.