Elisa Monte, Artistic Director

Company | Elisa Monte | Tiffany Rea-Fisher | The Dancers

"The choice to dance is completely instinctual, completely compelling. We all struggle through life trying to understand why we’re here and what we’re doing. For me, dance has always been my way of communicating of finding answers. There was just no other path."
- Elisa Monte, Artistic Director

A professional dancer since age 11, Elisa Monte made her debut at New York’s City Center in the Agnes DeMille revival of Carousel. An alumnus of George Balanchine's School of American Ballet, she spent eight years as a principal dancer with the Martha Graham Company, and also danced with Lar Lubovitch and Pilobolus, among others.

Already renowned as a choreographer even before she launched her own company, Monte experienced success with her first choreographic work, Treading (1979). The works that followed cemented her reputation as a creator of innovative, profoundly passionate works that captivate audiences with their sensuality and energy. Her signature movements, eloquent in their articulation of joy and anguish, draw on an extensive choreographic vocabulary that never shies from breaking new stylistic or emotive ground.

Monte’s achievements include the creation of more than 40 works that have been performed by Elisa Monte Dance, in addition to such world renowned companies as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, Ballet Gulbenkian of Portugal, Teatro alla Scala Ballet, Philadanco, Dallas Black Dance Theater, North Carolina Dance Theater, the Batsheva Dance Company of Israel, and the PACT Contemporary Dance Company of South Africa.

She was among the first choreographers awarded a commission by the National Choreography Project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Exxon Corporation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Monte has also been a choreographer-in-residence at various venues around the country and abroad, including Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Salt Lake City, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, California State University at Humboldt, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center.

As artistic director of the company, Monte has seen her career come full circle. Just as Treading was created as part of an initiative to develop new choreographers from within the Martha Graham Dance Company, today Monte is strongly committed to identifying and nurturing new talent. “As I reflect on my evolution from student to teacher, I hope to be able to offer as much to younger dancers as I received from those who came before me,” she says.