Emily Schoen Branch is a dance artist named “Top 25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine.
Baryshnikov Arts Center (New York) chose her as their Martha Duffy Resident Artist for their BAC Space Residency. She won the Gibney Dance boo-koo grant for emerging artist in New York City, a Princess Grace Fellowship nomination by METdance (Texas), and various domestic and international residencies including at the Tunisian National Theater in Tunisia. She has been Artist-In-Residence at multiple organizations, including for Jamaica Center for the Arts and Learning’s Choreographers and Composers series (NYC) and, more recently, at the University of Washington through their “Body Space Time” residency. She’s fulfilled 14 commissions for companies and university programs throughout the country including Olympic Ballet Theater (Washington), Santa Barbara Dance Theater (California), METdance, Ormao (Colorado), Columbia Ballet Collaborative (New York), among others.
Emily’s former group, Schoen Movement Company, was home to her collaborative and creative endeavors in New York for 6 years. Together, they partnered with dancers from Tunisia for over 2 years, creating an original evening-length work titled “See me in your eye” which premiered in New York in 2019. Baryshnikov Arts Center, Dance Motion USA / Brooklyn Academy of Music, Queens Council for the Arts, LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, and the US Embassy in Tunisia supported the project.
They were also presented at various East Coast venues including three times at the iconic Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, the historic Judson Memorial Church, WestFest, Jamaica Performing Arts Center, and Joe’s Pub / DanceNOW.
Beyond the stage, Emily created “A Movement Flight”—a site-specific, happy hour dance performance, crafted for breweries. It was adapted for 5 breweries: in New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and California. She remade the show with a new creative team in Seattle. Titled, “Flight / An Evening of Dance and Drinks,” it premiered to a sold out house at Lagunitas Brewing Co in Nov 2022.
As a freelance dancer, Emily worked for Kyle Abraham/A.I.M.; the Metropolitan Opera in works by Doug Varone, Mark Morris, and Carolyn Choa; The Rolling Stones in their 50th Anniversary reunion tour; and for 8 years with KEIGWIN + COMPANY. With Larry Keigwin, she was privileged to tour extensively both domestically and internationally, collaborate on a dozen new works, and serve as repititeur. She additionally assisted Larry in commissions for The Juilliard School, Marymount Manhattan, and his community series—“Bolero”—reenacted throughout the US.
Emily currently lives near Seattle where she’s choreographing, teaching, and beginning a fresh chapter since leaving New York during the pandemic. She has been on faculty at Pacific Northwest Ballet, and has additionally taught at Washington-based Spectrum and Olympic Ballet Theater, who commissioned her to make a ballet on their company. Her local choreographic efforts have received support from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
Her recent dance film, “Hollow Hearts” debuted in Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Dance Film Festival where it received Honorable Mention, and has since been accepted into American Dance Festival’s Movies By Movers and AAlchemy’s Give Me a Break Dance Film Festival. At the latter, she won the “Excellence in Dance and Videography” award.
Emily received her BFA, Summa Cum Laude, from the University of Arizona, and is originally from Brookfield, Wisconsin where she began her training under Kellie Plath. She’s currently pursuing her MFA in Dance at the University of Washington.
