Emily Barasch is a choreographer, intimacy professional, and educator for dance, theater, film, and television. Emily comes to the field of intimacy work with over a decade of professional choreography and dance experience. With this background, she brings a complex understanding of directing bodies in space to her intimacy work. Her approach is extremely collaborative, often viewing herself as a translator between the director's vision and the actors boundaries. She facilitates an environment of informed consent and safety while staging and filming scenes of intimacy, nudity, sexual violence, and trauma. As an intimacy educator Emily gives classes and workshops in intimacy directing and consent for actors and directors. She is currently the Intimacy Director and Educator at Cal Arts in the Schools of Theater and Dance. She is a lecturer in dance studies at UC Riverside in the Department of Dance.
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As a choreographer Emily has received support and residencies from Atelier Real and Forum Dança in Lisbon, Portugal, Ponderosa Art Centre in Stolzhagen, Germany, and the PReS Residency in Kassel, Germany. She is the recipient of the James A. Doolittle Award and the Fine Arts Trust Award from UCLA’s department of World Arts and Culture/Dance. Her choreography has been presented at Highways Performance Space, The Electric Lodge, Eden’s Expressway, BAX, Judson Memorial Church, as well as internationally In Kassel, Germany at the Halle 2, the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, and at the Stockholm Fringe Festival. She founded and curates the quarterly show, First Draft at Human Resources Los Angeles, an experimental works in process show for local LA based performing artists.
As a dance educator Emily teaches both theory and practice courses at UC Riverside's Department of Dance. She has developed and taught original courses in Dance and Pop Culture, Worldbuilding through Performance, Dance as Political Activation, Dance Entrepreneurship, and Improvisation. She regularly teaches courses in Best Practices for Intimacy Coordinating and Directing at Cal Arts' Schools of Theater, Dance, and Film. Emily was a Teaching Associate at UCLA's department for World Arts and Culture/Dance. Emily regularly facilitates her workshop, Intimacy for the Apocalypse, which has been offered at in Germany at FreeSkewl, the Dance Studies Association Conference (DSA), Performance Studies International (PSI), Dance/USA conference, and Stomping Ground LA. Emily holds a Bachelor of Arts in both Dance and Sociology from Tulane University and an MFA in Choreography from UCLA’s World Arts and Culture/Dance. She is a founding member of the Queer Dance Working Group at DSA.
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