Daniel Ezralow

Daniel Ezralow is an American choreographer and director whose work bridges concert dance, Broadway, film, opera, and mass spectacle through highly physical, theatrically inventive composition. Born in 1957 in Los Angeles, Ezralow initially pursued medicine at the University of California, Berkeley before abandoning those studies in 1976 to train intensively in New York with Alvin Ailey, the Joffrey Ballet, and at Juilliard. That shift from pre-medical study into professional dance helps explain the anatomical clarity and risk-conscious physicality that recur throughout his choreography.

Ezralow's early performing career placed him inside both postmodern theatrical experiment and technically rigorous American modern dance. He danced with 5 X 2 Plus and the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company before joining Paul Taylor Dance Company from 1979 to 1983, a foundational period that shaped his artistic sensibility. In 1983, he became an original dancer-choreographer with MOMIX, the visual-theater company formed by Moses Pendleton. Six years later, in 1987, Ezralow co-established ISO Dance Theater alongside Jeremy Hampton, Ashley Roland, and Morley Steinberg, where he danced and choreographed through 1994. Both companies served as laboratories for his evolving investigation of bodies, light, props, and visual misdirection.

From the early 2000s onward, Ezralow expanded into opera, film, television, and Broadway while maintaining a concurrent concert practice. He choreographed Julie Taymor's *The Green Bird* on Broadway, contributed choreography to Cirque du Soleil's Beatles production *LOVE*, and served as choreographer and aerial choreographer for *Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark*. In 2014, his work was associated with the Sochi Winter Olympics opening ceremony. These credits span collaborations with institutions including Batsheva, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Issey Miyake, and Japanese men's rhythmic gymnastics.

As founder and artistic director of Ezralow Dance, Ezralow consolidated his cross-media practice into a company identified with physical attack, humor, theatrical surprise, and multimedia staging. His career demonstrates that choreographic thinking operates across concert stages, camera work, runways, musical theatre, and civic spectacle—not as a sequence of unrelated commercial assignments, but as a sustained artistic inquiry.