Adrienne Chan

Adrienne is a contemporary ballet choreographer, dancer, and theatermaker based in New York City.

Blending the language of contemporary ballet with sociological themes and playful, earnest theatricality, her work investigates dance as a narrative medium. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Adrienne trained at Cleveland City Dance and performed with its pre-professional company, City Ballet of Cleveland. She continued her training at summer intensives with Pacific Northwest Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Atlanta Ballet, and Kaatsbaan. In 2023, she was a summer trainee at Ohio Contemporary Ballet.

Her choreographic work spans concert and theatrical dance, musical theater, and interdisciplinary performance. Recent work includes Romeo & Juliet (2024), a contemporary dance-theater adaptation that she directed and co-choreographed at the Loeb Ex at the American Repertory Theater. Lauded for its emotional depth and formal ambition as the first evening-length narrative dance production at Harvard, the production was described as a “total artwork…blending choreography, storytelling, and design into a profoundly moving whole—like no Shakespeare we’ve seen before” (The Harvard Independent). Her work has also been performed by the Harvard Ballet Company, the Asian American Ballet Project, and the Columbia Ballet Collaborative. 

In recognition of her choreographic and academic work, Adrienne has received the E. John Busser Scholarship, the Harvard Office for the Arts’ Radcliffe Doris Cohen Levi Prize for choreography and musical theater, and the Sociology Department’s Albert M. Fulton Prize for her honors thesis on labor, passion, and precarity in the dance industry. She graduated from Harvard University, where she studied Sociology and Theater, Dance, and Media.