Susan Osberg: writer/dancer/choreographer/ teacher/filmmaker

Interlochen Arts Academy, diploma, Juilliard BFA, Columbia University Teachers College MA

Susan Osberg grew up in Maine and her father edited and helped map the geology of the state. She is married to painter Winston Roeth and they live in Waldoboro, Maine and Beacon, New York. As artistic director of Workwith Dancers Company, Susan Osberg has worked experimentally and collaboratively with new music composers and visual artists since 1979.

Next Wave Festival in DANCE by Lucinda Childs at BAM: As a contemporary dancer, she performed in the avant garde 1979 production of the first Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, dancing in a famous collaboration of Lucinda Childs, Sol LeWitt and Philip Glass. She is still dancing in the film by Sol Lewitt, though after an injury, she began choreographing her own work.

As artistic director of Workwith Dancers Company, she performed and taught internationally in Canada, Sweden, Tunisia, Jordan, Italy, France, Holland and Estonia. In New York City she worked with her company on group projects, performing at Danspace Project, DTW, St. Mark’s Church, The Joyce-Soho, Judson Church (Movement Research), The Whitney Museum, PS 122, Theater of the Open Eye, Riverside Dance Theater, The Cunnigham Studio and what was then Dia, (Dia Center for the Arts.)

The Body as Language: an Anthology edited by poet Edwin Torres, includes her work. To date, she has written two Historical Fiction novels as she simultaneously focuses on community/environmental choreography, and video collabrations. Susan Osberg was a 2012 Artist Fellowship recipient in choreography from the Dutchess County Arts Council for her film Broken Words, a collaboration with Kathleen Anderson. Workwith Dancers Company received a NYSCA 2022 grant for her film Remembering Pina, hiring Beacon composer Jeremiah Marcus to make an original sound track. Her short film, Mining the Moon was completed (2020-2021) during Covid and has traveled the world to international festivals winning laurels and awards. She has shown Remembering Pina (memories from dancers on the works of German choreographer Pina Bauch) as a work in progress at the Beacon Film Festival, Pentacle Presents and at a DAB 2017 Festival in Göteborg, Sweden. Susan Osberg taught and showed her film Mining the Moon at Maine Media. A new solo based on the Medicine Wheel and mandala circle was performed in Dance Across Borders 2022 in Estonia. It was made into a new film Wheel of Time, recently shot in Beacon by Tom Moore, the cinematographer of her films.