Susan Thomasson, dancer/choreographer/educator, holds a BFA degree from the University of Utah, where she served an apprenticeship with Repertory Dance Theatre. She has performed a wide variety of modern dance styles, dancing and touring with the companies of Kathryn Posin, Raymond Johnson, Bill T. Jones, Bill Evans, and Rosalind Newman .She was a soloist with Anna Sokolow’s Players’ Project, performing nationally and internationally with the company, and assisting in reconstruction of Ms. Sokolow’s repertory. Susan performed the work of Pilobolus Dance Theater nationally and internationally in a solo/duet program originally created for Lincoln Center. In addition to her own work, she performs with Claire Porter, Elissaveta Iordanova and Mark DeGarmo.
She was a among a group of artists who pioneered aesthetic education at Lincoln Center Institute (now Lincoln Center Education), and has been involved in the development of many of the Institute’s national affiliates as a performer, teaching artist, and consultant. She has been a faculty member of Brooklyn College, Brookdale College, Hofstra University, Manhattanville College, Fairleigh Dickinson University, the University of Northern Iowa and Brooklyn’s Berkeley Carroll School. In addition to Lincoln Center and many independent teaching residencies, she is a teaching artist and master teacher for the 92nd St. Y, NY City Center, the Joyce Theater, and the NY and NJ State Councils on the Arts. Susan has served as a mentor for Arts Achieve, a federal arts innovation project for the NYC DOE, mentors DOE dance specialists for the Arts Matter program, and serves as a professional development leader and curriculum writer for the DOE. For the 92 Y’s Dance Education Laboratory, she is a master teacher in the development of NYC’s Pre-K arts curriculum. She served as education director for Mark DeGarmo Dance. Susan has been a faculty member of the Dance Conservatory at Purchase College, and currently teaches in the Hunter College undergraduate and graduate (AGDEP) dance programs.
Susan’s choreography ranges from work incorporating live percussion to literature-based dance/theatre pieces, to work blending movement with poetry and text. She has received several Choreography Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and her work has been presented at DanceNow, NY’s 40Up Series, Dance Theater Workshop (now NYLA), the 92 Street Y’s Harkness Dance Series, the American Dance Guild, NY International Fringe Festival, Flea Theater, New York’s Riverside Dance Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, Hopkins Theatre at Dartmouth College, and Iowa’s Cedar Arts Forum. Her choreographic projects include a commission from the University of Nebraska’s Lied Center for an evening-length dance/theatre/music work, dances inspired by her grandmother’s baking, hand gestures, and comic work based in the struggles of modern life – traveling, getting lost, power, language. Her recent work has incorporated original text, movement and storytelling with historical and political themes. Susan was among a group of Lincoln Center artists who participated in the reopening of Lincoln Center in 2021, creating a solo portrait in Andrea Miller’s “You Are Here.”
She was a contributing writer to a biography of Ms. Sokolow, Rebellious Spirit, which won the 1992 Torre del Bueno literature prize. A frequent master teacher and panelist, she writes arts and arts education materials for Lincoln Center Education, New York City Center, the Joyce Theater, the NYC DOE, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and music publisher Silver Burdett. In 2006 Susan received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Teaching Artists and the New York State Council on the Arts, and a Governor’s Award in the Arts from the State of New Jersey.