Jessamyn Lawrence

Jessamyn Lawrence, a native of Southern California, trained with Cynthia Young and Laurence Blake at Pasadena Dance Theatre, at the Pacific Northwest Ballet School and American Ballet Theatre in New York, and on scholarship at the San Francisco Ballet School. She was a member of ABT's Studio Company for the 2004-05 Season, where she performed as a soloist in the New York premieres of ballets by Dominic Walsh, Stephen Mills and Brian Reeder. She has danced with Pasadena Dance Theatre as the Sugar Plum Fairy and as the Snow Queen in The Nutcracker, Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in a variety of principal and soloist roles in contemporary ballets choreographed by Laurence Blake, Charles Anderson, Cynthia Young, Scott Putnam, Jodie Gates, Leslie Carothers, and Francisco Martinez. She also danced as a member of Utah Ballet in Salt Lake City, under the direction of Maureen Laird and Richard Wacko and has appeared with Francisco Martinez Dancetheatre in Los Angeles. In 2001 she received the Pasadena Arts Council Joan Orr Dance Scholarship and in 2003 was nominated for a Lester Horton Award in Ensemble Performance for Francisco Martinez' ballet, Moonlit Dances. Over the last several years she has been honored with numerous awards for her contemporary choreography. In 2003 she received the Regional Dance America Outstanding Emerging Choreographer Award and in May, 2004 was the recipient of the RDA/Pacific Award for Outstanding Choreography. In April, 2005, her new work, some thousand hundred million more bright worlds, was premiered by ABT's Studio Company in its 10th Anniversary Celebration in Jazz at Lincoln Center. Ms. Lawrence returned last season to dance and choreograph with Pasadena Dance Theatre. In the fall of 2006 she danced in the Los Angeles Opera's production of Manon.