Ayano Elson Will Bring CONTROL to the Chocolate Factory Theater

Ayano Elson is an Okinawan-American dancer and choreographer based in New York City. Her work draws on improvisation, archival materials, and interdisciplinary collaboration to create performance-based practices that examine power, authorship, and interpretation in contemporary Western dance.

Her dances have premiered at the Kitchen, Danspace Project, PAGEANT, Center for Performance Research (CPR), ISSUE Project Room, and Roulette, among others. She has held artist residencies at the Chocolate Factory Theater (2025), the Kitchen (2025), CPR (2022), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and ArtCake (2021), was a Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow (2018), and a Gibney Dance Work Up artist (2015). Elson has been awarded grants through the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, NYSCA, and the Mertz Gilmore Foundation. She is currently dancing for Melinda Ring and Kim Brandt, and has performed and toured in works by Jesi Cook, Milka Djordjevich, Simone Forti, Gwendolyn Knapp, Juli Brandano, Ella Dawn W-S, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy + Niall Jones, and Alexa West at museums, galleries, and theaters in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.