About

Annie Sailer is a dancer, painter, installation artist, teacher, and director of Annie Sailer Dance Company. She has directed ASDC since 1983 and ASDC (New York) since 2001. She has been teaching modern dance classes, and presenting her work in dance venues, colleges, and alternative spaces throughout the U.S. since 1978.

Annie lives in New Haven, CT after relocating from Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2012. She teaches modern/contemporary dance classes in the New Haven area, paints and assembles installations in her Erector Square Studio, and commutes to NYC for rehearsals with New York-based Annie Sailer Dance Company. 

Annie’s dance training is based on the Erick Hawkins Technique, which she has studied since 1974. She holds a BFA in Painting from Webster College an MA in Dance from George Washington University, and an MA in Studio Art from New York University. Annie also earned a Certificate in Deep Muscle Massage from the Potomac Massage Therapy Institute in Washington, D.C. and has attended several workshops with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in Body-Mind Centering.

Annie’s Artistic Process

Annie’s choreography, paintings, and installations are generated by physicality, materials, and their spatial relationships. The forms that she creates-whether completely abstract or with references to the recognizable world-often suggest emotional, psychological, and spiritual states of mind, reflecting the aesthetics and sensibilities of the present.  

In addition to choreographing complex group dances, Annie also creates structured improvisations informed by spatial structures, imagery, and costumes and installations that she has designed.

Through Annie’s creative process, images and feelings emerge and inform the direction of and outcome of her art. Frequently an idea will come to her in one discipline and end up being realized in another. Sometimes she works with parallel content in more than one discipline at once, each one informing the other. All of her choreography, paintings, and installations are abstract in form, while some also contain narrative imagery suggesting issues of identity and archetypal, human drama.

Dance Training

Annie’s dance training is based on the Erick Hawkins Technique, which she has studied since 1974. Her strongest influence is Nancy Meehan, director of Nancy Meehan Dance Company and former principal dancer with Erick Hawkins Dance Company.  She performed with Nancy Meehan Dance Company in 1984 and 1985. She has also been enormously influenced by her training (2009 – 2013) with Cathy Ward, director of CW Dance and former principal dancer with Erick Hawkins Dance Company.

Booking Annie

Annie is available to teach master classes, workshops, and for individual instruction and to set new choreography.

For inquiries, please contact Annie at anniesailer@gmail.com.