Emily Coates has performed internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp and Yvonne Rainer. Highlights include duets with Baryshnikov in works by Erick Hawkins, Mark Morris, and Karole Armitage; principal roles in ballets by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins; and performing in Rainer’s work for over twenty years.
Her own choreographic projects weave together fragments of dance histories and other cultural relics of modernism, with special attention to highlighting overlooked or dismissed forms of knowledge. Her work has been commissioned and presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Guggenheim Works & Process, Wadsworth Atheneum, Quick Center for the Arts, Hopkins Center for the Arts, University of Chicago, Performa Biennial (NYT Best Dance of 2019 with Yvonne Rainer) and Danspace Project (NYT Critic’s Pick 2017, Fall Dance to Watch 2018), among others, with funding and fellowships from the Sloan Foundation, Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and National Endowment for the Arts (with Kaatsbaan Cultural Park).
She is a Professor in the Practice and Director of Dance Studies in Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at Yale University, where she created the dance studies program. She holds a secondary appointment in the Directing Program at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. With physicist Sarah Demers, she co-authored Physics and Dance (Yale University Press, 2019). She majored in English at Yale ‘06 and holds an MA ‘11 and MPhil ‘17 in American Studies. She has collaborated with Lacina Coulibaly since 2007.