Emily Coates (choreographer, writer, performer) received the School of American Ballet’s Mae L. Wein Award and went on to perform internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer.
Career highlights span three duets with Baryshnikov, in works by Erick Hawkins, Mark Morris, and Karole Armitage, and performing a featured role in Joan Jonas’s To Touch Sound (2024) at MOMA. Praised by legendary critic Deborah Jowitt as “lively, inevitable, quite beautiful, and worth thinking deeply about,” her own choreography has been widely commissioned, presented, and supported by venues including Works & Process at the Guggenheim, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace Project, Performa, The Wadsworth, Quick Center for the Arts, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Jacob’s Pillow, Kaatsbaan, Ballet Memphis, University of Chicago, Alliance Theater, Carnegie Hall, and Yale Repertory Theatre, where most recently she was the choreographer for Rhinoceros (dir Liz Diamond).
A featured artist in the exhibition Hard Return: nine experiments for this moment, at Neuberger Museum (2023), and a fellow at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (2019) and Center for Ballet and the Arts (2016), she is a Professor in the Practice at Yale, where she served as founding Director of Dance Studies (2006-2025). She co-authored Physics and Dance with physicist Sarah Demers (2019), and co-edited Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 with Yvonne Rainer (2023).
