Rachel Bernsen born in Minneapolis, MN, is an interdisciplinary dance artist, educator, and nationally certified Alexander Technique Teacher (since 2008), living between Vermont and Brooklyn, NY. Her current performance practice called Novel Formats, is a seven-part performance cycle rooted in interdisciplinary collaboration and improvisation that develops, through the lens of choreography, loose structures that allow for the creation of meaning in real time through spontaneity, collectivity, novelty, and risk. Other projects include performer with Yvonne Rainer and Emily Coates in their reconstruction of Rainer’s Parts of Some Sextets at Performa 19, choreographer and performer in multiple projects with composer Anthony Braxton including his opera Trillium J, his interdisciplinary work Pine Top Aerial Music both at Roulette Intermedium, and his Sonic Genome at the Turin Jazz Festival, movement director for playwright Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s A Knock on The Door for Imagine, End of Life Festival at Riverside Church, among other theater works, and was co-creator with Nalebuff of, I Know You So Well, a Sound and Movement Choir for People Who Work in Healthcare at Artspace in New Haven. She is co-founder of the performance collective, Masters of Ceremony (2011-2020) with dance artist Melanie Maar and music artists Taylor Ho Bynum and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. Rachel has taught in a diversity of contexts ranging from universities to community centers in the U.S. and internationally. She holds an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts, an AT teaching certification from the American Center for the Alexander Technique (ACAT) in NYC, and an advanced teaching certification in the Art of Breathing©. rachelbernsen.com
