Annie Dorsen is a theater director working at the intersection of algorithmic art and live performance. Her most recent project, Prometheus Firebringer, premiered at Bryn Mawr College in January 2023, and had a New York premiere at The Chocolate Factory in May, co-produced by New York Live Arts and MAX Media Art Xploration. The piece then moved Off-Broadway to Theater for A New Audience in Fall ’23.
Previous algorithmic performances include Infinite Sun, an algorithmic sound installation commissioned by the Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019), The Great Outdoors (2017), Yesterday Tomorrow (2015), A Piece of Work (2013), Spokaoke (2012), and Hello Hi There (2010). These pieces have been presented at numerous theatres and festivals world-wide, including at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), the steirischer herbst festival (Graz), the Holland Festival (Amsterdam), and Festival d’Automne (Paris).
In 2010, she collaborated with choreographer Anne Juren on Magical, presented at ImPulsTanz Festival Vienna, Lyon Biennale de la Danse, Théâtre de la Cité International Paris, Kampnagel Hamburg, and many others.
In 2009 she created two music-theatre pieces, Ask Your Mama, a setting of Langston Hughes’ 1962 poem, composed by Laura Karpman and sung by Jessye Norman and The Roots (Carnegie Hall) and ETHEL’s Truckstop, seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. In 2012 she worked again with Questlove, directing his concert performance Shuffle Culture at the BAM Opera House. She is the co-creator of the 2008 Broadway musical Passing Strange, which she also directed. Spike Lee made a film of her production of the piece, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, and was released theatrically by IFC in 2010.
Her pop-political performance project Democracy in America was presented at PS122 in spring 2008. The short film, I Miss, originally the centerpiece of Democracy in America, screened at American Film Institute Festival (AFI Fest), SXSW Film Festival, The New York Film Festival’s “Views From the Avant-Garde” and the Nantucket Film Festival.
A retrospective of Annie Dorsen’s algorithmic work was presented in 2022, at Bryn Mawr College with major support by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. The publication Algorithmic Theater: Essays and Dialogues, 2012-2022 was created as a literary companion to the event, collecting a decade of writings by and about Dorsen, including dialogues with artistic collaborators in addition to provocative essays on theater and technology.
She has taught at University of Chicago and Bard College, and been a frequent guest lecturer at numerous universities and art schools in the US and abroad.
Dorsen is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Spalding Gray Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists Award, and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.