A LONGER BIO
Jessie Young is a dance artist, choreographer, and teacher whose work is shaped by the dance scenes she has lived and worked within, including Salt Lake City, Chicago, Seattle, and New York, and by her ongoing relationship to the Olympic Peninsula. Moving between Brooklyn and Port Angeles, Washington, on the unceded lands of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, she approaches dance as a practice of attention to sensation, effort, rhythm, timing, and place.
Her artistic practice has been deeply influenced by the artists and communities she has worked within over time. In Chicago, this includes Khecari, The Seldoms, and The Moving Architects. In New York, Beth Gill, Tere O’Connor, Abby Zbikowski, Julie Mayo, and Cynthia Oliver have been significant influences through performance, study, collaboration, and exchange.
Jessie’s choreography is deeply shaped by an ongoing teaching practice that she considers essential to her creative work. Teaching functions as a site of choreographic research, where questions of effort, sensation, duration, rhythm, and attention are developed through working with dancers and continually return to her work as a choreographer and performer.
She is currently developing Working Beings, a collaborative solo project with choreographer Jeanine Durning through residencies and extended working periods on the Olympic Peninsula and in New York City. The project is part of Jessie’s larger investment in creating conditions for experimental dance on the Peninsula through residency, artistic exchange, process sharing, and conversation, while remaining in active relationship with the New York dance community that has shaped her practice.
Jessie’s choreography has been presented by The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, Dixon Place, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, AUNTS, and Links Hall. Previous works include Teeth, le sigh, Sick Sad World, and Smoke not Fog.
Jessie has been on faculty at the American Dance Festival and Field Center for a summer festival in 2026. In Port Angeles, she is on the Modern Dance faculty at Port Angeles City Ballet, curates Local Voyages, a seasonal performance series creating a platform for contemporary performance and exchange between artists from the Olympic Peninsula and beyond, and serves as Director of Education & Artistic Engagement at Field Arts & Events Hall.
Jessie holds an MFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a BFA from the University of Utah.