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.
In her independent choreographic and performance work, 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, Triskelion Arts, 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 monthly show, First Draft at Junior High Los Angeles, an experimental works in process show for local LA based performing artists.
As an dance educator Emily worked as a Teaching Associate teaching courses in: dance composition, improvisation, world dance history, and art as social action at UCLA's department of World Arts and Culture/Dance. Emily has also developed and given workshops in Writing for Dance, Improvisation, and Intimacy for the Apocalypse in Germany at Sozo Visions in Motion school, the online platform FreeSkewl, and at the Dance Studies Association Conference (DSA). Emily holds a Bachelor of Arts in both Dance and Sociology from Tulane University as well as an MFA in Choreography from UCLA’s World Arts and Culture/Dance. She currently teaches dance classes through Everybody Dance LA.