Natasha Adorlee is an Emmy Award winning choreographer, filmmaker, composer, and creative leader based in San Francisco. Working primarily in contemporary ballet, her practice exists at the intersection of movement, light, and cinematic space, integrating influences from street dance, film language, music, and technology to create emotionally rigorous and visually architectural works for the stage and screen. Her work is defined not only by choreography, but by the total environments she constructs, where pacing, atmosphere, and embodiment shape how audiences feel time, tension, and release.

A first generation Asian American woman, Natasha’s work is deeply informed by questions of inheritance, memory, displacement, and endurance. Rather than approaching identity through literal narrative, she embeds it structurally through musical architecture, spatial design, light, and the body itself as a carrier of generational experience. Her choreography is known for its clarity of form, cinematic pacing, and the fusion of classical technique with grounded, rhythmic movement languages drawn from street and contemporary dance traditions. The result is work that feels both formally precise and viscerally alive.

Natasha began choreographing in 2016 while maintaining an award winning performance career with ODC Dance, Kate Weare and Company, Robert Moses’ Kin, and the San Francisco Symphony. After attending SUNY Purchase and graduating from UC Berkeley, she was invited to join ODC Dance, where she performed extensively and contributed original choreography, sound design, and art direction to over twenty repertory works. This foundation as a performer deeply informs her choreographic approach, grounding her work in physical intelligence, musicality, and embodied risk.

Her breakout short film Take Your Time won more than ten international awards in 2018, including Best Short at the San Francisco Dance Film Festival, establishing her as a sought after filmmaker, choreographer, and composer across disciplines. Since then, she has created over twenty original dance based works spanning stage, film, and immersive performance contexts.

Natasha has been commissioned by Joffrey Ballet’s Winning Works, Kansas City Ballet, Nevada Ballet Theatre, Richmond Ballet, BalletX, Oklahoma City Ballet, Ceprodac in Mexico City, Kawaguchi Ballet in Japan, Ballare Carmel, Ballet22, Jacob’s Pillow, and Imagery. Beyond the concert stage, she has created original work for Pixar Animation Studios, Oculus, National Geographic, The New Yorker, YouTube, and Cricket Wireless, bringing choreographic and movement based thinking into cinematic, commercial, and technological environments.

Her work has been recognized with an NEA Grant, a Dresher Fellowship, a Jacob’s Pillow Choreographic Fellowship, and the 2024 Grand Prize at the Palm Desert Choreography Festival. Her piece Blooming Flowers and the Full Moon also received an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Performance. She is currently entering a prolific creation period with upcoming new works for Tulsa Ballet, the San Francisco Symphony, Richmond Ballet, and Boulder Ballet, alongside large scale film and immersive projects.

In addition to her creative practice, Natasha is a dedicated educator and mentor. She teaches Dance on Camera workshops internationally, is developing an online course focused on movement and film, and serves as an Artistic Advisor for Ballet22. She was the final Artistic Fellow with Amy Seiwert’s Imagery, and her leadership within the field reflects a commitment to expanding how dance is made, experienced, and who it is for.

Natasha’s work does not simply present choreography. It reorganizes attention, sensation, and perception, inviting audiences into worlds where movement becomes a way of thinking, remembering, and feeling differently.