Emma Portner

choreographer

Born in Ottawa in 1994, Emma Portner's dance training included summer courses at the National Ballet of Canada and, after moving to New York City at the age of 17, at the Ailey School. She has been the movement director for several music videos, including Maggie Rogers (Fallingwater, 2016) and Devonté Hynes/Blood Orange (With Him / Best To You / Better Numb, 2017 – Hope, 2019) and has also released her own dance videos, including on music by Sylvan Esso (Slack Jaw, 2017). As a supporting actress, she has appeared in the films Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) and I saw the TV Glow (2024). She choreographed the musical Bat Out of Hell, directed by Jay Scheib, which was performed at Manchester Opera House in 2017 and was subsequently also shown in London's West End, in Toronto, in New York City (off-Broadway) and in Oberhausen. In 2018, she was involved in the Works&Progress project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and in the same year she created Femme debout, a film with performances for the Bacon Giacometti exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen near Basel. Also in 2018, she created For All Its Fury for the Hubbard Street Dance Company in Chicago and the duet evening An Evening of Twos, which was shown at the Jacob's Pillow dance festival in Massachusetts. In 2019, she created several movement sequences for the Netflix series The Umbrella Academy. In 2020, she choreographed in the context of classical dance for the first time – her Duo Islands was commissioned by the Norwegian National Ballet. There she also created the piece Some Girls Don't turn in 2023, now for 23 dancers. This was followed by Bathtub Ballet (2024) for the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm, Forever, maybe (2024) for the ballet company at the Gothenburg Opera House and the Duo Elephant (2024) for the Kammerballetten company in Copenhagen.

Emma Portner will be working with Bayerisches Staatsballett for the first time in the 2025-26 season.

(Information as of March 2025)