Jessie Young is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer and teacher originally from Port Angeles, WA.
Young crafts choreography as a poetic provocation, viewing dance as a form that must constantly redefine itself in relation to shifting sensorial, emotional, political, and cultural circumstances. She choreographically directs conditions of exploration that render themselves as dances, collages, photographs, sound scores and pedagogical structures. The felt sense of her body in relationship to landscapes, imagery, and poetic associations drives Young’s work forward. Her aesthetic is informed by her upbringing in the Pacific Northwest, by the foggy collisions between familial loss and magical thinking that she experienced there. In this way, her work is oceanic, but not about the ocean; the work is of, rather than about, this geography. Young’s artistic practice is embolded by feminist tradition and its engagement with the grotesque and deeply personal.
She has been an artist in residence at New York Live Arts (Fresh Tracks), Brooklyn Studios for Dance (NY), The Floor on Atlantic (NY) and Centrum (WA). As a performer, she has had the pleasure of working with Abby Z and the New Utility, Julie Mayo, Stephanie Acosta and Khecari Dance Theater, among others. Currently, she is dancing in work with Beth Gill, Julie Mayo, Same As Sister and Kendra Portier. As a curator and producer, she works with AUNTS in their Public Performance Initiative.
Young has been on faculty at Lion’s Jaw Performance + Dance Festival, Mark Morris Dance Center and Gina Gibney Dance Center. In addition, she has taught master classes and leads workshops at Bard College, Pieter Performance Space, Davidson College, Beloit College, University of Utah, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Base: Experimental Arts + Space (Seattle) and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was recently received the Beverly Blossom/Carey Erickson Alumni Award for 2021. She has been on faculty at Rutgers University and is currently on faculty with the American Dance Festival, contributes to the online teaching platform freeskewl and has a virtual pilates studio through the platform Core to Coeur.