About

Short bio:
born in Minneapolis, MN, Rachel Bernsen is a dance and interdisciplinary artist and somatic educator, currently living in Brooklyn, NY and Vermont. Her performance practice is rooted in interdisciplinary collaboration and improvisation and in developing, through the lens of choreography, loose structures in her work that allow for the creation of meaning in real time through spontaneity, collectivity, novelty, and risk. Rachel is also a certified Alexander Technique teacher.

Long bio:
Born in Minneapolis, MN and now living in Brooklyn, NY and Vermont, I am a choreographer, dancer, educator and certified Alexander Technique teacher whose work reflects an ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary practice, collaboration, and experimentation. I’m currently working on NOVEL FORMATS, a multi-year, 7-part performance cycle with a range of artists in different permutations. Outside of my own projects I frequently collaborate and perform with musicians including cellist and composer, Tomeka Reid, saxophonist Caroline Davis, violist and electronics artist Mac Waters, and cornetist and multi-instrumentalist Taylor Ho Bynum.

I performed with Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates at Performa 19 (2019), in a reconstruction of Rainer’s Parts of Some Sextets (PoSS, a seminal work from 1965). In 2018 I made a piece with ten healthcare workers and caregivers, I Know You So Well, A Sound and Movement Choir for People Who Work in Healthcare, a multi-disciplinary work of movement, text, voice, in collaboration with writer Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

I’m a founding member of Masters of Ceremony (2011-2020), an interdisciplinary performance collective with dancer/choreographer Melanie Maar and composer/performers Taylor Ho Bynum and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. I’ve created multiple performance works with visual artist Megan Craig including Traveling In Place (2017) for The Yale University Art Gallery and Colorada (2015) for Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim in Neuenhaus, Germany.

I’ve worked with composer Anthony Braxton on multiple projects, including as choreographer for his Sonic Genome Project (Torino Jazz Festival, Torino, Italy), as choreographer and performer for his opera Trillium J (Roulette, NYC) and as a performer in his interdisciplinary Pine Top Aerial Music project. Other collaborative works with musicians and composers include vocalist Kyoko Kitamura, bagpipes player Matthew Welch and numerous projects with bassist and electronics artist Carl Testa and vocalist Anne Rhodes. I’ve been choreographer/movement director for theatre including Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s A Knock on the Door for the Reimagine Festival (Riverside Church), A Christmas Carol, adapted and directed by Carol Dunne at Northern Stage, and NOISE, A Musical by César Alvarez and directed by Sarah Benson.

I’ve presented work in New York City at New Ear at the Fridman Gallery, The Austrian Cultural Forum’s Moving Sounds Festival, Arts For Art, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop (NYLA), Roulette, The Chocolate Factory, The Vision Festival, Issue Project Room, Movement Research Spring Festival, Catch! Performance Series, The Poetry Project, The NOT Festival, Dixon Place, Jalopy Theater, and Movement Research at the Judson Church. In New Haven at the Yale University Art Gallery, International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Artspace New Haven. I have been presented internationally at De Studio Sound in Motion Series and at The Free Music Festival in Antwerp, Belgium; Vienna, Austria; Amsterdam,The Netherlands; Bologna, Italy, and in Cologne and Kassel Germany.

I teach at Movement Research and have a private practice in the Alexander Technique in New York City. I've been a guest faculty at Yale School of Art, Bennington College, Trinity College, Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts, Miami Dade College (MDC Live Arts Lab), Yale University, Wesleyan University, Texas Woman’s University, Dartmouth College, and at Tsekh Moscow Dance Agency Summer Dance Festival, Moscow, Russia. I was also a member of the dance department at The Educational Center for the Arts (ECA) high school.

I am a nationally, AmSAT, certified teacher of Alexander Technique since 2008, with an advanced certification in The Art of Breathing©. I hold an MFA in Dance from Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, and a BA in English Literature/minor Religious Studies from Macalester College.

Grants & Awards
- 2026 In Situ Polyculture Commons - Artist Residency
- 2024, 2018 NEFA New England Dance Fund recipient
- 2022 Vermont Arts Council Artist Development Grant
- 2020 CT Artist Fellowship
- 2018 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant
- 2012, 2013 New Haven Mayor's Community Arts Grant
- Multiple creative commissions, Artspace New Haven (CT)
- 2017 Guest artist-in-residence, Montalvo Arts Center
- 2007 NEA Honorary Fellow, Djerassi Resident Artists Program
- 2005/6 NYLA (DTW) Fresh Tracks artist-in-residence.



film short by Rachel Bernsen, Me Reeds Birds