From sanitation workers to firefighters, Venetian gondoliers to professional baseball players, power linemen to forestry technicians, Allison Orr creates award-winning choreography with unlikely performers. Inspired by the beauty and virtuosity in the practiced movement of labor, Allison’s dances feature the often-overlooked choreography of work that sustains our everyday lives. Building on her background in anthropology and social work, Allison founded Forklift Danceworks, and over the past 20+ years she and her team have honed a method of ethnographic choreography that engages community members as co-authors in the creation of large-scale civic spectacle. Challenging audiences to expand notions of dance and performer, her dances have been performed for audiences of 60 to 6,000+. Allison has been named a MacDowell Fellow, a Dance | USA Fellow in Social Change, and a Doris Duke United States Artist Fellow. Her large-scale work The Trash Project is the subject of a feature-length documentary film entitled Trash Dance. Allison is a 4th generation Texan and lives in Austin with her husband, two children, and their two dogs.