PODCAST 187: Ann Carlson
Release Date: 10.23.25
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The Curiosity That Moves Us with Ann Carlson
Episode 189: Show Notes.
At the heart of every great artistic work is the exploration of curiosity and a commitment to the process of creation. Today on Movers & Shapers, Ann Carlson joins us to discuss her illustrious career in interdisciplinary arts and shares the deep curiosity she possesses about movement, meaning, and the human experience, with work borrowing from the disciplines of dance and performance as well as visual, conceptual, and social art practices. In this conversation, Ann reflects on how she first discovered her love of dance, how working with Meredith Monk and exploring performance art shaped her creativity, and the thriving performance scenes in NYC in the 90s that opened doors for experimentation. She shares the inspiration behind her work with animals, the reality of supporting herself financially as an artist, and how she navigated motherhood and her dance career. She also dives into the delicate marriage between process and product in creation before discussing her dance project, The Symphonic Body. Finally, Ann reveals what is piquing her interest today and shares a glimpse of what the future will hold for her in her career. Thanks for listening!
Key Points From This Episode:
- A brief overview of today’s guest, Ann Carlson, and how she found her love of dance.
- How performance art and working with Meredith Monk inspired Ann’s own creations.
- Cross-connecting dance with other performance scenes during her time in NYC.
- What inspired Ann’s animal series and how she managed to support herself.
- How Ann’s dance career pivoted when she started a family.
- The beautiful amalgamation of process and product in dance creation.
- What Ann learned about art from the poet Allen Ginsberg.
- Ann looks back on her career and some of the most meaningful projects she did.
- Ann tells us what she is curious about today and what her next project will be.
ABOUT Ann
Ann Carlson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work borrows from the disciplines of dance and performance as well as visual, conceptual and social art practices. Carlson’s work takes the form of solo performance, large-scale site-specific projects, ensemble-stage based dances and performance video.
Ann’s work as a whole is engaged with flattening traditional hierarchies, and throwing off the guardrails of who gets access to participate and be immersed in the contemporary dance / art experience. Carlson often works in a series format, loosely organized into interspecies performance collaborations, dance / performance works made with and performed by people gathered together by a common profession, activity or shared passion and large scale site specific performance installations, commissioned works for dance companies, galleries, museums, orchestras and collaborative performance videos. Carlson works from a “ world as studio” aesthetic, cultivating and curating the elements of everyday life as a way of exploring how to be together, how to be alone, in a world bound by and blended with the more-than-human.
Carlson is the recipient of numerous awards for her artistic work. Her awards include a Creative Capital Award, a Doris Duke Award for Performing Artists, a National Dance Project Award, two American Masters awards, a USA Artist Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Fellowship from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, she is the recent recipient of a Fellowship from the Santa Monica Arts Council, multiple MapFund awards, numerous awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Ann was the first recipient of the Cal /Arts Alpert Award in dance.
Carlson has a long-time collaboration with visual artist Mary Ellen Strom. Their current project, SoS is a site adaptive work in response to flooding and rising sea levels around the globe. Carlson/Strom’s performance video work is held in the public collections of Fonds Regional D’Art Contemporaire, (FRAC) Marseilles, France, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, The Rose Museum, at Brandeiss University, Waltham, MA. Carlson / Strom was awarded The St. Garden’s Prize in sculpture for their video, “Four Parallel lines”.
Carlson has been a visiting faculty member at numerous universities, among them, Wesleyan, Stanford, and Princeton University and currently is thrilled to be an adjunct professor at UCLA’s Dept. of World, Arts, Culture and Dance. Carlson lives in Los Angeles, California and Bozeman, Montana.
photo: Michael Poole
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Podcast produced by: The Moving Architects
Interviewer: Erin Carlisle Norton