Emily Coates is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and educator whose performance practice moves across disciplinary and cultural divides, with a special emphasis on illuminating the marginalia and marginalized voices discovered through archival research, and unexpected intersections of science and dance and their histories.

Her thirty-year career includes performing internationally with New York City Ballet, Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project, Twyla Tharp, and Yvonne Rainer. Career highlights include three duets with Baryshnikov, in works by Mark Morris, Erick Hawkins, and Karole Armitage.

Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented by Baryshnikov Arts Center (2010), Ballet Memphis (2011), Carnegie Hall (2014, 2018), Danspace Project (2015, 2017, 2018), Works & Process at the Guggenheim (2016), University of Chicago (2017), Yale University Art Gallery (2018), Wadsworth Atheneum (2018), and Performa (2009, 2019), among other venues. Her close collaborators include Charles Burnham, Lacina Coulibaly, Sarah Demers, Liz Diamond, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ain Gordon, Derek Lucci, Josiah McElheny, Will Orzo, Emmanuèle Phuon, and Yvonne Rainer.

She received the School of American Ballet’s Mae L. Wein Award for Outstanding Promise; Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Martha Duffy Memorial Fellowship; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics; a 2016 Fellowship, Center for Ballet and the Arts; a 2019 Dance Research Fellowship, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Jerome Robbins Dance Division; and a National Endowment for the Arts presentation grant, with Kaatsbaan Cultural Park.

Her essays have appeared in numerous publications. With physicist Sarah Demers, she is co-author of Physics and Dance (Yale University Press, 2019). She co-edited with Yvonne Rainer the anthology Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets 1965/2019, with art direction by Nick Mauss (published by Performa, Wadsworth Atheneum, and Lenz Press, 2023).

She is Director of Dance Studies and Professor in the Practice of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at Yale University, where she since 2006 she has been responsible for creating the dance studies curriculum.