Sean Dorsey is an award-winning choreographer and dancer and the founder and Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions. Recognized as the nation’s first out transgender modern dance choreographer, Dorsey has won audiences and accolades from San Francisco to New York with his powerful dances that provide a window into transgender and queer experience.

Dorsey’s acclaimed work is a fusion of dance, storytelling and theater. Praised as “exquisite” (BalletTanz) “breathtaking” (San Francisco Bay Guardian) “brilliance” (San Francisco Chronicle), Dorsey has gained national attention for demystifying modern dance with his accessible, deeply moving work that is followed by transgender, queer and straight audiences alike. Celebrated as the nation’s first openly transgender modern dance choreographer, Dorsey is creating new space for trans/queer bodies and stories in dance. Watch video of Dorsey’s work.

Dorsey has been awarded two Isadora Duncan Dance Awards, the Goldie Award for Performance and was named “San Francisco’s Best Dance/Performance Company” by the SF Weekly. Most recently, Dorsey was named in Dance Magazine’s top “25 to Watch.”  Dorsey’s acclaimed suite of dances ‘Lou’ was named in the “Top Dances of 2009” (San Francisco Bay Guardian).

Dorsey has been named one of the Top Ten in Bay Area dance by both the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Bay Area Reporter and named one of the international dance scene’s most promising choreographers by Europe’s leading dance magazine, BalletTanz. He has received commissions from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Queer Cultural Center and Highways Performance Space with support from the Irvine Foundation.

Read about Sean Dorsey in the San Francisco Chronicle, In Dance, Curve Magazine, the SF Weekly, Time Out New York, Out Magazine, watch his interview on TV’s Culture Wire or visit our Press page.

Dorsey’s acclaimed show Uncovered: The Diary Project returned to San Francisco in February 2010 for another sold-out run, celebrating Sean Dorsey Dance’s Fifth Anniversary Season. The culmination of a year-and-a-half community research process, Uncovered: The Diary Project features powerful dances based on the diaries of transgender and queer people, from the famous to the unknown. Uncovered was named one of the "Top Dances of 2009” (San Francisco Bay Guardian).

The dances of Uncovered have toured to New York, Los Angeles and San Diego. Sean Dorsey Dance is now booking tour performances of Uncovered and continues to tour other work in the Company’s repertoire. Please contact us with bookings inquiries to bring Sean Dorsey Dance to your Festival, theater or college.

“breathtaking beauty”
  - San Francisco Bay Times

“deeply felt, splendidly shaped…
aches with beauty and grief”
  - San Francisco Bay Guardian

Dorsey, his groundbreaking choreography, and his work as Artistic Director of Fresh Meat Productions are the subject of a PBS/KQED-TV Spark episode. Dorsey also recently worked with the Wachowski Brothers (Directors, The Matrix, V for Vendetta) to choreograph a music video for Antony and the Johnsons. The song, ‘Epilepsy is Dancing,’ is featured on Antony and the Johnsons’ CD, The Crying Light.

Dorsey’s work has been presented extensively throughout the Bay Area at venues including ODC Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Dance Mission Theater, Project Artaud Theater, CounterPulse, the Jon Sims Center, 848 Community Space and the African American Art and Culture Complex; at the National Queer Arts Festival, Fresh Meat Festival, Tranny Fest, West Wave Dance Festival, HOT! Festival (New York), Fresh Fruit Festival (New York), HomoAGoGo (Olympia), Out On Screen Festival (Vancouver), Women on the Way Festival, Lesbian and Gay Dance Festival; and on tour in cities across the US and Canada.

BOOKINGS:

CONTACT US about bookings (freshmeatinfo (at) gmail.com).

READ PRESS ARTICLES about Sean Dorsey.

CHECK OUR CALENDAR for performances by Sean Dorsey Dance.

ELECTRONIC PRESS KIT for Sean Dorsey Dance.

WHAT THE PRESS IS SAYING:

“exquisite…poignant and important”
 - BalletTanz

“trailblazing”
 - San Francisco Chronicle

“astonishing”
 - New York Dance Insider

“breathtaking…tearjerking and hilarious”
 - San Francisco Bay Guardian

“boundlessly gifted…flawless dance”
 - Bay Area Reporter

“I’m an elder of the transgender community, and Sean Dorsey is my pride and joy. His sensitivity to the pain that comes with transformation is as compassionate as any Zen master’s. His deadpan comic timing, his skill at seduction, his charm and boyish sexiness all make us – his audience – love him all the more. Dorsey choreographs and performs…with a skill that rivals Mark Morris.”
 - Kate Bornstein

“words and gestures drenched with the kind of raw honesty that’s made Dorsey an artistic force to reckon with”
 - SF Weekly

“stunning dance”
 - Bay Times

“Sean Dorsey is…the most refreshing phenomenon in dance theater hereabouts”
 - BalletTanz

“Dorsey’s intelligent and evocative work helps build a frame of reference to enable viewers to experience dance outside of gender. At the same time, Dorsey is helping create a movement vocabulary to signal a newly gendered body. These conscious choices form an important contribution to the process of queering modern dance.”
 - Critical Dance

“I can’t remember the last time I saw so much tenderness, romanticism, delicacy of feeling, tentative grace, truth of gesture, human longings for loyalty, affection, and abiding relationship surrounded by such claims to be shocking, bold, futurist, subversive.”
 - DanceView Times