Lucy Dillon is a dance artist investigating the utility of movement for claiming embodied agency. Her work declares aliveness and unapologetic presence by researching precarity, impulse, and gravity in the body. Her lived experience, community, and training as a dancer, runner, and athlete fuel her movement invention. Lucy has shared her choreography nationally – including at venues such as: Ailey Citigroup Theater (New York), Ruth Page Center (Chicago), and Levy Dance (San Francisco). She has been an artist-in-residence at Columbus Urban Arts Space, Levy Dance, Iowa Choreography Festival, and SAFEhouse Arts. As a performer, Lucy danced professionally with Malashock Dance Company, Polaris Dance Theater, and Call It Art. Currently, Lucy dances with Abby Z & The New Utility. She has an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, and in 2024 was selected as an ATLAS Choreographer at ImPulsTanz in Vienna, Austria.
As an educator, Lucy has taught in higher education, K-12, and community settings. She created choreography for dance majors at The Ohio State University, bringing one of her pieces to American College Dance Association’s Midwest Conference, and for Denison University’s Dance Company. She has shared Master Classes at: ACDA’s National Conference (2023), National Dance Educator’s Organization’s National Conference (2023), DanceBARN Festival (2021), and Cleveland Dance Festival (2025). In both the classroom and in a creative process, Lucy centers the whole person by emphasizing relationships, experimentation, and productive tension. Her work as a choreographer, performer, and educator urgently seeks resilience, intimacy, and vulnerability – activating a need to connect to our bodies and one another to survive.
Artist Statement
I make contemporary dance that unwinds and unpeels the self, embracing the whole person in our lineages, fictions, blockages, and yearnings. My choreography centers the body and all its complexities, allowing us to embrace our full selves within the work. Grounded in embodied feminist ideologies, community care, and the navigation of shifting energetic states, I approach dance-making as both personal and political.
Pushing against a capitalist patriarchal hegemony intent on driving us to numb and isolate, my choreography provokes a need to connect to our bodies and one another to survive. I create movement that elicits a hyper-sensitive, adaptive, generous state of being in performers, interrupting systems that silo, sanitize, or fear disruptive bodies. My aim is to craft choreography that activates us toward liberatory, anti-patriarchal futures.
In my creative process, I experiment with highly complex, rigorous physical tasks informed by: release-based Contemporary, Floorwork, Jazz, West African, and endurance-based sports. I then layer spatial, temporal, and energetic tasks to relentlessly complexify the game. This persistent complexity invites the somatic state of precarity: an embodiment of the delicate instability that exposes the deeply-held visceral power of the body and its intuitive impulses. I am informed by Queer and Feminist Theory—specifically the work of Jean Thomas Tremblay, Ann Cooper Albright, and Janet O’Shea. These philosophies shape my inquiry: How does the somatic state of precarity reveal the insecurity of living under patriarchal capitalism? By dancing within this state of precarity, we practice an embodied resilience.
My choreography teases out the delicate edges of unstable balance while eliciting an innate drive of momentum. This friction reveals both the exhaustive labor of navigating risk, and the resilient potential of the empowered body. My work follows how the body transforms under pressure—carving new pathways of possibility and activating us toward liberatory futures.