CARRIE HANSON

Carrie Hanson is a choreographer, dance educator, and the Founding Artistic Director of The Seldoms. Her work involves research and embodiment of social, political, environmental issues and history, as a mode of pressing performance to speak to larger subjects. She has created connections with artists across Chicago, designing projects with practitioners of visual arts, theater, music/sound design, fashion, and architecture. Hanson pursues a type of performance that stages articulate, rigorous, problem-solving bodies. In 2015, she was named Chicago Tribune’s “Chicagoan of the Year in Dance”, honored for her “brawny, brainy movement”. Time Out Chicago called her work in an outdoor pool, Giant Fix, one of the “best dance moments of the past decade”. Her 2015 work about the figure of Lyndon B. Johnson, Power Goes, was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, received a National Performance Network Creation Fund and NEFA National Dance Project Award, and toured to ten US venues, hosting community members as on-stage performers via a workshop entitled “Bodies on the Gears”. She has received commissions from Texas Performing Arts, the Morton Arboretum, and the National Theater of Mannheim, Germany. Hanson was a resident artist at the National Center for Choreography at Akron, and an Ace Fellow at Trillium Arts in 2021. She teaches at the Dance Center of Columbia College Chicago, and was an Interdisciplinary Artist-in-Residence for Fall 2019 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is certified in Laban Movement Analysis, earned a BFA at Texas Christian University and an MA Laban London. Hanson has received two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, a Ruth Page Award, was a Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum Lab Artist and one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” in 2012. The Chicago Tribune wrote, “Hanson is among the more fascinating and surefooted of our contemporary choreographers”.