About

Leslie Satin is a choreographer, dancer, writer, and teacher based in New York City. Her dances, interdisciplinary collaborations, and workshops have been presented at many venues in NYC (including Joyce SoHo, La MaMa E.T.C., Ailey Citigroup Theater, 92nd Street Y, The Performance Project @ University Settlement, Movement Research/Artists Space, Arts on Site, WeisAcres, Dixon Place, Triskelion, Construction Company), as well as elsewhere in the US, and in the UK, Brazil, and Israel. Her performances, workshops, and writing have been supported by residencies (Corporation of Yaddo, the Dragon’s Egg), arts organizations (New Mexico Arts Division, Center for Contemporary Arts/Santa Fe, Railyard Performance Center/Santa Fe), and university grants (including New York University/Gallatin Jewish Studies).

Satin has collaborated with many artists, including video artists Andrew Gurian and Ian Rosenkranz, composer/performance artist Connie Beckley, photographers Tom Brazil and Karen Robbins, composers Dan Evans Farkas and Roy Nathanson, dancers/writers Victoria Hunter and Claudia Brazzale, and, of course, the dancers in her choreography. She has worked with Billy Clark and CultureHub at La MaMa, conceiving and directing programs of telepresence-derived “Distance Dances” for students at New York University, Seoul Institute of the Arts (Korea), and the University of Chichester (England).

Satin performed in many dances with Marjorie Gamso and the Energy Crisis Dance Company. She has appeared in the work of Meredith Monk, Jeremy Nelson/Luis Lara Malvacias, Sally Gross, Elaine Shipman, Einat Amir (PERFORMA 2013), Davide Balula (PERFORMA 2009), Yoshiko Chuma, Barbara Mahler, Pavel Zustiak, Despina Stamos, and others. She has appeared in the videos and photographs of visual artist Gabriela Vainsencher and video artist Andrew Gurian.

As an undergraduate student, Satin studied composition and ballet with James Waring. After graduation, she began studying Cunningham Technique through the Merce Cunningham Trust; she continues that practice. She has also studied Klein Technique (with Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein) for many years. She has explored a range of contemporary/somatic movement practices, takes classes with Vicky Shick whenever possible, and periodically studies West African dance.

Satin is a longtime Arts Faculty member at the Gallatin School of New York University, where she teaches courses joining studio practice in dance and choreography with academic studies: dance and performance history, criticism, and theory. She has also taught at Bard College, Empire State University, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center/Fordham University, and has been a guest artist and lecturer at Princeton University, Barnard College, the University of Chichester (England), Hamidrasha (Israel), and Florida International University. Satin holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Performance Studies (NYU).

Satin’s new book (Routledge 2024), Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying Oulipo, considers the work of experimental 20th-century French writer Georges Perec from a dancer’s perspective. This interdisciplinary work brings together art-making parallels and their individual and sociocultural contexts. It focuses on the relationship of Perec’s writing to the ideas and practices of the Judson Dance Theater and the contemporary choreographers whose work extends its lineage, as well as to iconoclasts in other art forms. It addresses his writing as “ludic literature,” linked to the writerly “constraints” of Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) and to other score-based compositional approaches across the arts. It addresses, too, Perec’s having been orphaned as a small child by the Holocaust; Dancing situates his work historically and personally, linking it to his experiences of loss and his thoughts about Jewishness. Moreover, Dancing is framed as a performative autobiographical enactment of Satin’s relationship to Perec, a convergence of textual, danced, remembered, and imagined selves.

Forthcoming writings include "On the Rocks: Two Encounters," for The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance (Routledge) and “’A few dance lessons with James Waring and who knows?: Maybe something will happen’: Remembering the Teaching of James Waring,” for a collection about Waring edited by Carrie Noland and Alla Kovgan.

Satin’s performance texts and writings on dance and performance appear in numerous journals, including Dance Research Journal, Performing Arts Journal (PAJ), Movement Research Performance Journal, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Literary Geographies (England), Theatre Journal, Choreographic Practices (England), Dancing Times (England), Gesto (Brazil), and Street Notes, and in edited collections, including Georges Perec’s Geographies: Material, Performative and Textual Spaces (eds. Charles Forsdick, Andrew Leak, Richard Phillips, 2019), Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget (ed. Clare Parfitt, 2021), The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance (Routledge, forthcoming), Re-Inventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything Was Possible (ed. Sally Banes, 2003), and Moving Words: Dance Criticism in Transition (ed. Gay Morris). Satin served on the Editorial Board of Women & Performance, and co-edited its theme issue, Performing Autobiography. She co-edited Movement Research Performance Journal #34.