Practitioner
Ephrat Asherie
Legend of Dance
Why They Matter
Asherie matters because she demonstrates how street and club forms can enter concert institutions while remaining attached to named communities, teachers, practitioners and social histories. Her choreography expands the spaces in which breaking, house, waacking and hip hop are seen, but its deeper…
Known For
Biography
Ephrat Asherie is a Bessie Award–winning choreographer and b-girl whose work brings the vocabularies and social histories of New York's breaking and underground club-dance communities into concert institutions without treating those forms as anonymous source material. She developed as a dancer inside these communities—mentored by Richard "Break Easy" Santiago and active as a co-founding member of MAWU, an all-women house-dance collective—before pursuing formal study. Asherie earned a bachelor's degree in Italian from Barnard College, Columbia University, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where her graduate research examined the vernacular-jazz roots of contemporary street and club dances.
Asherie founded Ephrat Asherie Dance in 2012. The company's work is rooted in African American and Latinx street and social dances, including breaking, hip hop, house and waacking. The company made its Jacob's Pillow debut in 2013 and returned with *Step 4.2* in 2014, establishing a concert platform where dancers retained distinct backgrounds and "accents" within shared movement languages. In 2016, Asherie received a New York Dance and Performance "Bessie" Award for Innovative Achievement in Dance.
Her subsequent commissions and presentations have included Works & Process at the Guggenheim, the Kennedy Center, Vail Dance Festival, Fall for Dance, PHILADANCO!, Parsons Dance and Malpaso. She has also received a Harkness Promise Award, a Jerome Artist Fellowship and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships. The 2018 work *Odeon* joined her choreography with compositions by Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, performed by a live quartet led by her brother, pianist Ehud Asherie. Jacob's Pillow's archive documents the work's world premiere and a duet featuring Asherie and Ousmane "Omari Mizrahi" Wiles, demonstrating her approach to structured collaboration in which distinct dance voices, musicians and rhythmic histories remain legible rather than blended into generic fusion.
Her current work continues to connect collective practice, improvisation and performance-making. Recent projects include *Cypher*, developed through NCCAkron's 2024 Dancing Lab, and *Shadow Cities*, created with Arturo O'Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.
Legacy & Impact
Asherie matters because she demonstrates how breaking, house, waacking and hip hop can enter concert institutions while remaining attached to named teachers, communities and practitioners. Her choreography expands the spaces in which these forms are performed, but its deeper contribution is structural and ethical: dancers retain individual expertise, collaboration remains visible, and vernacular forms are treated as living systems rooted in specific social histories rather than interchangeable movement effects.
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