Hilary Brown-Istrefi is a Canadian-American choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in Rockaway Beach, New York. Along with her twin sister Briana Brown-Tipley, she is the co-founder and director of Same As Sister (S.A.S.), a bi-national performance collective celebrating thirteen years of collaborative and interdisciplinary storytelling. Their performance and film commissions have been presented and screened internationally in the United States, Canada, Greece, Italy, and France. Awards, recognition, and funding: Bogliasco Foundation’s Fall 2026 Dance Fellow; New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2019 Choreography Fellow; 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship Dance Finalist; 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Award Nominee for Outstanding Production (“This is NOT a Remount”); Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Emergency Grantee in Dance (2025, 2022, and 2017); and Queens Arts Fund’s 2020 New Work Grantee in Multi-Discipline. Outside of Same As Sister, Brown-Istrefi’s recent collaborations have included “Solar Solace” (in development) conceived and directed by Cinthia Chen (2025-26 Collider Fellowship at Lincoln Center); Blessed Unrest’s “Body Unredacted” (2026) directed by Jessica Burr at The Makers’ Space; and DanceStream Projects’ “Let’s Move the World” at the 2025 United Nations General Assembly Healing Arts Week Research Symposium.
