Bio

Hallie Chametzky is a performer, choreographer, writer, archivist, and organizer based in New York City.

Her choreographic work has been shown at University Settlement (NYC), Undiscovered Countries (NYC), The Craft (Brooklyn), 7Midnights Physical Research (NYC), Spoke the Hub (Brooklyn), and the Grace Street Theater (Richmond, VA), among others. She is a 2024 resident artist at Moulin/Belle, a 2023 MOtiVE Brooklyn "For the Artists" Artist in Residence, a 2021-22 University Settlement Performance Project Fellow, and a 2019 recipient of the VCUarts Undergraduate Research Grant for her interdisciplinary performance project 22 Percent: A Disintegrating Data Visualization. Hallie holds a BFA in Dance and Choreography from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Hallie performs with Bluebird Theatre Company. She has previously performed with Yehuda Hyman/Mystical Feet Company,  Stephanie Saywell, BEATRICE, a horror/comedy play (NYC, November 2023);The Final Veil, a movement opera about the remarkable final moments of Polish-Jewish dancer Franceska Mann in the gas chambers of Auschwitz (NYC, July 2022); Snap Soup Dance Company (Richmond, VA); a Merce Cunningham MinEvent staged by Andrea Weber at the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City; and works by Liz Lerman, Helen Simoneau, Karen de Luna, x, Aviya Hernstadt, Autumn Proctor Waddell, and Eric Rivera.

In addition to her dance practice, Hallie is a poet and dance writer. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Mouse Magazine, Gigantic Sequins, Indolent Books, Z Publishing House, and The Underground, among others. Her writings on dance can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, In Dance, Contact Quarterly, Dance Magazine, First of the Month, and The Library of Congress Performing Arts Reading Room Blog.

In the summer of 2018, Hallie served as a Fellow in the Music Division of the Library of Congress where she worked in the dance collections. During that time, she organized, rehoused, and processed thousands of items in the Sophie Maslow Papers, Jane Dudley Papers, and Victoria Phillips Collection, a project which encompassed her interests in dance, language, primary source materials, and cultural heritage. She went on to serve as the Archives/Audience Engagement Intern at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival and first the Archiving Specialist then the Director of Archiving and Preservation at Dance/USA.

Hallie is active in the movement for Palestinian liberation and organizers in art, dance, leftist, and Jewish spaces in New York City and nationally.

Artist Statement

I am a movement artist, writer, and archivist interested in the contemporary body as the continuation of ancestral legacy, and as a site for exploration and confrontation. My performance work investigates our reductive, misinformed cultural understandings of women’s lives and legacies.

My choreography often grapples with archival materials, combining traditionally crafted material with found movement, text, and audio from sources as wide ranging as archives, books, radio, social media, and internet videos. The movement language and text stem from my contemporary training, my Jewishness, and my work as an archivist and writer. When working with other artists, devising techniques expand my work to reflect experiences both alike and unlike my own. I utilize spoken word to heighten emotional extremes and narrative threads, colliding text and narrative with pure movement and abstraction. Much of my work seeks to problematize of the concept of “truth” in biographical/historical creative product. ​

I create performance that is intellectually rigorous, yet invites audiences of all backgrounds and interests to join me inside of that rigor.