Tori Lawrence is a choreographer and filmmaker and serves as the Artistic Director of Tori Lawrence + Co. She is the 2019-2020 Artist-in-Residence and Lecturer at Middlebury College (Vermont). She creates immersive site-specific dances, interdisciplinary performance installations, and dance films. Her environmentally-based work inspires an imaginative and sustainable way of looking at, thinking about, and using space. Her choreography has been presented nationally and internationally, including three site-specific performance commissions by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, where she created “Holding Place,” an evening-length work created in response to the architecture of the Barnes’ new Philadelphia campus. The performance was set to music by acclaimed Brooklyn-based music group Bing & Ruth. Philadelphia Weekly describes her site-specific work as “poignant,” “stunning,” and “arresting.”

She was awarded a 2018 Lighton International Artists Exchange grant to fund her recent dance film project in Skåne, Sweden’s southernmost region. She was a lecturer in dance at the University of Kansas (2017) and the choreographer-in-residence at Franklin & Marshall College (2018). She has been awarded artist residencies and fellowships at Yaddo (NY; 2018), Djerassi (CA; 2017), Playa (OR; 2018), Brunakra (Sweden; 2018), Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation (NY; 2018), Charlotte Street Foundation (MO; 2016-17), Dance Ireland (Dublin; 2014), and Workshop Foundation (Budapest; 2013). Her work has been commissioned and presented by Philadelphia Dance Projects, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Stockholm Screendance Festival, Cape Town International Film Festival, Portland Maine Film Festival, Agite y Sirva, San Francisco Tiny Dance Film Festival, Oklahoma Dance Film Festival, Legion Arts/CSPS, Lawrence Arts Center, Albrecht-Kemper Art Museum, Mulvane Art Museum, and Cyprus International Film Festival, amongst others. Lawrence graduated from Franklin & Marshall College and received her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was a recipient of the Iowa Arts Fellowship.