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Emily Beattie is a Somerville based artist working in multiple disciplines: movement, text, space, film, and interactive media to create performance in many formats.
Her process includes researching choreography, exuberantly performing movement, curiously exploring film, and demanding more out of the dance + technology works she thinks up. Most times her research and collaborative works result in body based movement performances. Returning themes in her work are her interrogation of the blend of live and processed experiences and the illusive nature of real connection between one another.
Emily is a recipient Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship for Choreography for 2018. She also received the Boston Foundation’s Next Steps for Boston Dance award and the Live Arts Boston grant, the New England Foundation for the Arts Choreographer’s Fund, and the Somerville Arts Council Fellowship for Performance.
Her experimental performance works have been featured at ICA Boston, Brown University, Ammerman Center for the Arts at Connecticut College, American Repertory Theater’s Oberon Theater, UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures/Dance department, The Fowler Museum, Pieter Performance Space in Los Angeles, The Hammer Museum, NYU Tisch School of the Arts and Spoke of the Hub in NY. She has been curated by the following festivals, Imagine Festival at Earthdance, CyberArts Festival, Gloucester New Arts Festival, Design Boston, the Waterfire Festival in Rhode Island, Festival for the Moving Body, at Stony Brook University and The Berkshire Fringe Festival. Internationally, she has performed or exchanged with artists at the National School in Quito Ecuador, Renku Poetry Festival in Kyoto, Japan, as well as the Rhodopi International Theater Lab in Formello, Italy.
As part of the art duo all real machines, with artist, Eric Gunther, Emily creates portals into the experience of connection within a screen-based virtual world. Their soon to be released work Rolling Point, encourages movement and collaboration between participant, user, and performer.
Her dancework Me Anthem created and performed at REDCAT with sound designer Jonathan Snipes in Los Angeles, and Antennae a solo created and performed at the Ammerman Center for the Arts, with media artist and musician Brian Knoth are two of her solo interactive sound and movement pieces that explore input and output of the the moving form as it impacts the viewer.
Her film series Hearth, that mines the engenius creativity in domestic labor, has been featured in the Emma Clark Library as well as the Canterbury Shaker Village Dance Revival Day as a four hour durational installation.
As an accomplished performer, Emily has been honored to participate in the works of award winning artists. She created and toured with David Rouseve’s Stardust and Lionel Popkin’s, Ruth Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She has also had the honor to perform in the works of Donald Byrd, Simone Forti, Stephan Koplowitz, Jennifer Monson, Sara Rudner, Michelle Boule, and Edisa Weeks. Emily trained in classical ballet in Virginia and holds a BFA from Boston Conservatory. In Los Angeles, Emily studied with scholars and artists in the World Arts and Cultures/Dance department at UCLA to earn her MFA in Choreography.
Emily’s writing is published in the peer reviewed International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media for her co-written article “Movement signals and narrative noise: the development and performance of Antennae (v.2)” with Dr. Brian Knoth. She also co-wrote an article for proceedings in the Computer Music and Multidisciplinary Research with Dr. Margaret Schedel entitled “Inscribing Bodies: Notating Gesture”. She has been featured in Boston Voyager as a Thought-Provoker and numerous other publications.
Emily serves as the creator and festival chair of Cygnet Fest and SWAN Day Performance Festival, that brought together thirty women artists working in comedy, dance, music, performance art, poetry, and theater to both collaborate and share their work for Boston area audiences as part of the Support Women Artists Now Day, international festival. Emily also curates an experimental series of dance at the alternative venue Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge, MA.
Experimenting and educating young artists in dance and media are a passion for Emily. She has processed interactions with her teachers, mentors, and artists to develop and share approaches to movement while on faculty at the following institutions: Salem State University, Endicott College, Stony Brook University, Brown University, UCLA, Walnut Hill School for the Arts, the Boston Ballet Community Program, Summer Stages Dance, and Moving Target Boston, with recent opportunities to be a guest at Winsor School, NuVu, Rhode Island School of Design, Tufts University, and Boston University at the American College Dance Festival Association.
