Lailye Weidman is a dancer and maker, currently based in Boston. Her present projects include a short dance film with artist Leila Simon Hayes, a dance theater duet with improviser Alli Ross, and mining in the studio with choreographer Hana Van der Kolk. Lailye also serves as a guest editor and editorial assistant for Contact Quarterly, a biannual journal of dance, improvisation, and performance. She received her BA from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance. During her senior honors work on the Intersection Project, she choreographed a live city‐map and initiated an improvisational walking and observing practice that has since been taught at Otis College of Art and Design and Williams College. At UCLA, she was awarded the Forti Family Scholarship and the Soo Jin Kim Dancing Scholarship, which she used to fund a professional training program in Contemporary West African Dance at Germaine Acogny’s Ecole des Sables in Senegal.
While in L.A., she danced in the choreography of Victoria Marks, Hana van der Kolk, Christine Suarez, and Carol McDowell, contributing extensively to the creation of several new works, including Vic Mark’s debuts for the AWARD! Show and NOW Festival 2011 at REDCAT and van der Kolk’s recent evening length work Vessels at the Hammer Museum. Lailye’s work has been shown at Anatomy Riot and Pieter PASD in Los Angeles, CounterPulse in San Francisco, APE Performance Space in Northampton, and SOOP (Stories of Our People) in Boston. She has been an artist‐in‐residence at the Hothouse summer residency program at UCLA and the SEEDS Festival 2009 (Somatic Experiments in Earth Dance and Science). She teaches movement in academic and community settings and co‐taught a dance/geology workshop with Dr. Chris Weidman at SEEDS 2008. Her writing has been published in Contact Quarterly and ITCH dance zine.