Sean Dorsey
He // Him // His
[ID: A light-skinned trans-masculine person with a warm and confident smile. He is wearing a black T-shirt, glasses, and has a short brown pompadour.]
Portrait photo by Lydia Daniller.
San Francisco, CA
2024 USA Fellow
This award was generously supported by The Rockefeller Foundation.
_
Sean Dorsey is an Emmy Award–winning transgender choreographer, dancer, writer, and educator. Dorsey has toured his work to more than thirty cities across the US and internationally, and he has taught with his explicitly trans-positive pedagogy in more than thirty-five cities.
Dorsey is a Doris Duke Artist, a Dance/USA Artist Fellow, has been awarded five Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, and in 2019 became the first openly transgender person on the cover of Dance Magazine.
Dorsey has been awarded support by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Dance/USA, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Creative Work Fund, the Gerbode Foundation, the California Arts Council, the SF Arts Commission, and more.
Dorsey has been awarded commissions by the American Dance Festival, the Bates Dance Festival, Dance Place (Washington, DC), 7 Stages (Atlanta), Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Queer Cultural Center (San Francisco), Highways Performance Space (Los Angeles), The Theater Offensive (Boston), Links Hall (Chicago), and Velocity Dance Center (Seattle).
As a transgender, white, disabled/Hard-of-hearing and queer longtime social practice artist, Dorsey creates his works over two-to-three years in deep relationship with/in community. Dorsey’s work is a fusion of full-throttle dance, exquisite queer partnering, intimate storytelling, and theater.
Now on an international tour in over ten cities, Sean Dorsey Dance’s new work The Lost Art of Dreaming is an invitation to embrace expansive imagination, connect with joy and pleasure, and propel ourselves toward loving futures.
Dorsey is the Founding Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions (FMP). Now in its twenty-second season, FMP invests in the creative expression and cultural leadership of transgender and gender-nonconforming communities.
The Lost Art of Dreaming, 2022. Z Space, San Francisco. Photo by Lydia Daniller.[ID: Five dancers twirl along a dark stage in teal gowns with sleeveless bodices. The dancers reach their arms up and out in different directions full of wistful yearning.]
The Lost Art of Dreaming, 2022. Z Space, San Francisco. Photo by Lydia Daniller.[ID: Three dancers encircle a central dancer. Their hands and heads are raised upward towards the spotlights that illuminate them. The central figure holds his clasped hands parallel to his shoulders as they throw their head back. Each of the multiracial cast is dressed in a white T-shirt and white jeans.]