artist statement and biography

NYC-based dance artist creating works that challenge the limits of physicality and reframe performance spaces. Influenced by the visual art of the 1970’s, she simultaneously creates visually arresting installations and rigorous choreography. Her performances have included large scale paintings, 1000 sq ft of living lawn, 16ft tall paper sculptures, and other giant structures.

LAURA PETERSON

selected performances

  • Museum of Modern Art exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done. -Judson Reassembled event

  • The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts

  • Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors

  • Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival Inside/Out

  • Teatro Cervantes  Buenos Aires, Argentina

  • International Dance Festival Bytom, Poland

residencies

  • HERE Arts Center Artist Residency Program (HARP)

  • Bogliasco Fellowship and residency in Italy

  • Marble House Project

  • Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space
    at 14 Wall Street & Governors Island

  • Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning

  • Queens Museum of Art

  • Subcircle Residency

  • Dance New Amsterdam

commissions

  • Dixon Place (NYC) 

  • Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for the River-To-River Festival

  • Dance New Amsterdam

  • Reflection:Response Commission : Temple University

  • Created two works for Nick Cave’s Sound Suits
    with Balance Dance Company and the Boise Art Museum

grants

  • NYSCA Choreography Commission

  • Brooklyn Arts Council

  • Greenwall Foundation (multi-year support)

  • Trust for Mutual Understanding

  • Bossak/Heilbron Charitable Foundation

  • Puffin Foundation

  • Pennsylvania Council on the Arts

repertory for dance companies

  • Pennsylvania Ballet

  • Hartford Ballet

  • Group Motion Dance Company

teaching + choreography for dance students: 

  • Princeton University

  • Marymount Manhattan College

  • Rutgers University

  • SUNY Brockport

  • LIU Brooklyn

  • Lehman College

  • Bowdoin College

  • Hunter College

  • Old Dominion University

  • Joffrey Ballet School

workshops

  • Idaho, DC, Tampa, NYC, Bytom, Poland, throughout Germany, St. Petersburg, Russia, Buenos Aires, Argentina

current

  • The Joffrey Ballet School, NYC - Faculty

education

  • MFA in Dance
    Tisch School of the Arts
    New York University
    fellowship recipient

  • BFA in Modern Dance
    University of  the  Arts
    full scholarship recipient

“In Peterson’s visionary work, dancers
are never characters -- they're elements of a larger whole, which itself is a sign of some larger whole.”
 Tom Phillips, DanceViewTimes

“Smart, severe, oddly moving work”
Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am an interdisciplinary artist working in choreography and installation art. My pieces address the intersection of the materiality of the body and the physical world. These dances and tactile environments are in constant flux throughout each work and are concerned with matter, disintegration, duration, and the elegant exhaustion of each performer.

My interest in the arts – both live performance and visual forms – has always been deeply connected to my engagement with history and politics. In my dances, I am both concerned with the clarity of formalism and the underlying philosophical and social structures. While remaining profoundly influenced by modernism and the minimalist art works of the 1960s and 1970s.

My recent work is concerned with the climate emergency and the devastating effects humans have on the environment.

excerpts of three dances: SOLO, Failure, Interglacial