Biography

XAN BURLEY (she/her/hers) is a choreographer, performer, teacher, and arts administrator who was based in New York City from 2007-2018, where she continues to work and present choreography. Burley performed, toured, and taught nationally and internationally with Doug Varone and Dancers from 2012-17, dancing on stages such as the Joyce, BAM/Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Metropolitan Opera. She continues to act as répétiteur for many of Varone’s seminal works, staging pieces such as Bessie Award-winning Boats Leaving (2006), as well as Lux (2006) and Strict Love (1994), which she staged on UF casts with SoTD professor Alex Springer. She has also performed in the work of artists such as Chris Aiken, Nancy Bannon, Daniel Charon, Jeanine Durning, Shannon Gillen, Angie Hauser, Shannon Hummel, Donnell Oakley, and Tami Stronach, among others. Burley holds an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Smith College and received bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from the University of Michigan. With Alex Springer, she was honored with the 2015 Emerging Artist Alumni Award from Michigan’s School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. 

CHOREOGRAPHIC RESEARCH 

Burley develops choreographic research in close collaboration with Alex Springer, with whom she has been working since 2006. Burley and Springer’s work has been commissioned/presented in NYC and elsewhere by Movement Research at the Judson Church, Danspace Project, New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Festival, Joe’s Pub, the 92Y, the TANK, MATA Interval at the Museum of the Moving Image, Gowanus Art & Production, the American Dance Festival (NC), Smith College’s Theatre 14 (MA), the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought (MA), Trinity College (CT), Rhode Island College, the Dance Complex (MA), Women Art Exchange (FL), and Treasure Hill Artist Village (Taipei, Taiwan), among others. 

With Springer, Burley has received support for the development of their creative work through an AIR Taipei International Artist Residency at Treasure Hill Artist Village (Taiwan), the Croft Artist Residency (MI), Jacob’s Pillow Research Fellowship and site-specific commission (MA), the Marble House Project Artist Residency (VT), a yearlong artist residency at University Settlement in NYC, and NYC space grants from Center for Performance Research, Gibney Dance, BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and Triskelion Arts. Their evening-length interdisciplinary project for North was created as recipients of Brooklyn's Center for Performance Research (CPR) Inaugural Technical and Production residency and with support from the Mertz Gilmore Late-Stage Production grant.  

Burley and Springer have been commissioned to create performance work for many university and college dance departments and repertory companies throughout the U.S. including the University of Michigan, James Madison University (VA), Skidmore College (NY), Emory University (GA), Ohio University, Santa Fe College (FL), Florida School of the Arts, and Zenon Dance Company (MN), to name a few. 

They have created numerous dance films, including daylighting (2009), which won the Silver Award in the Dance Films Association's 48-Hour Challenge. An Ostrich Proudly (2011) was featured on Hulu in TenduTV’s Essential Dance Film and was the subject of scholar Priscilla Guy's "Where Is the Choreography? Who Is the Choreographer? Alternate Approaches to Choreography through Editing," a chapter from the Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies. Their choreography also appears in the feature-length film Frances Ha (2013), which was later screened at the Boondock Film Society (NY) with a coinciding site-specific performance of Burley’s duet never only one. 

Every Body Meeting (EBM), Burley and Springer's interdisciplinary performance collective, includes artist/curator Will Owen (PA), award-winning dancer Hsiao-Jou Tang (NY), and others. Every Body Meeting reimagines the “general body meeting” as fertile ground for inclusive, hyper-collaborative creative process at the intersection of multiple disciplines and perspectives. The members endeavor to both defy and celebrate their disciplinary distinctions to craft meaningful and impactful dance performances and art experiences.   

Through collective visioning, EBM makes multimedia, site-responsive performances employing choreography, music, sculpture, technology, film, and sometimes food. Their performances take place in theaters, museums, alternative sites, and public spaces and invite audiences to interact and participate as co-creators. EBM devises content for live performance, art exhibitions, and workshops that connect with people of many ages, backgrounds, and life experiences. 

In the summer of 2024, EBM was one of seven artist teams chosen from 450 applicants for a prestigious International Artist Residency at Treasure Hill Artist Village in Taipei, Taiwan. During this residency, Burley and EBM realized several creative projects, including two sold-out, site-responsive and interdisciplinary performances in August and an art exhibition on view from September to December 2024, both in galleries at Treasure Hill. They created two additional exhibitions, one that featured a dance film, for storefronts in the local Shuiyuan market in Taipei, also on view through December 2024.   

Treasure Hill Artist Village commissioned Burley and Every Body Meeting for their annual Light Festival in March 2025, where their work served as the opening act for VIP attendees, including Taipei city officials, diplomats, professors, and cultural organizers. EBM conceptualized, choreographed, and performed an hour-long site-responsive performance; installed four different exhibitions—on view through May 2025—including a two-channel video installation and a single-channel video installation; and installed another two-channel video in a fabric environment, titled lost line, in the Shuiyuan Market. EBM has also been commissioned a third time to create a new, original performance for the 2025 SouthSpark Arts Festival, Treasure Hill Artist Village's inaugural street arts festival. 

Burley has received UF's College of the Arts Scholarship Enhancement Fund Award (2022-23/2024-25); Fall and Spring/Summer Research Incentive Awards (2022-2025); UF International Center Global Fellowship (2024) and Ad Hoc Faculty Travel Grant (2025); COTA Work-in-Progress Award (2022); the Gretchen Moran Research Fellow Award at Smith College (2019); and the Mertz Gilmore Late-Stage Production Grant through CPR (2016). 

CROSS-DISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION / SCHOLARSHIP 

In addition to Burley's long-standing work with Springer and Every Body Meeting, she pursues research interests with colleagues in Engineering, Architecture, and Learning Sciences. These collaborations investigate how dance and choreography can inform and expand other fields, leading to mutual innovation and deeper insight in both artistic and scientific contexts. They have resulted in co-authored publications, conference presentations, and experiential workshops emphasizing embodied learning.  

In 2025, Burley began serving as Co-Principal Investigator on Dr. Megan Butala’s National Science Foundation CAREER Award project, Key Chemical Principles Impacting Structure and Function in Compositionally-Complex Rocksalt Oxides. Over the five-year grant, Burley and Alex Springer will design choreographic activities that translate Butala's research into embodied practice. These will help high school and college students understand the evolving development of lithium-ion battery composition through movement.   

Burley co-authored a paper with engineer Dr. Elif Akçalı and Alex Springer titled "From Value Stream Mapping to Choreographic Tension Mapping: Preliminary Results and Insights from an Exploratory Study," which was published as a feature article in the Journal of Dance Education (March 2024). Springer and Burley presented this research at the National Dance Education Organization's Special Topics Conference, Data and Dance in February 2024 and continue to shape it to support Dance Composition learning. 

UF’s Center for Arts in Medicine Research Assistant Professor Dionne Champion invited Burley and Springer to join her team as choreographers for an NSF-funded project “Choreographing Science” in 2022 and 2023. Champion’s project brought together learning analysts, choreographers, and scientists to explore science phenomena with middle-school participants through movement and coding.  

In 2021, Burley and Springer presented their creative research at the Dance Studies Association Annual Conference hub Thriving in Proximity and in 2019's conference Burley presented her paper "Heterotopia and Co-Creative Choreographies: Reimagined Space and Relationship in Jeanine Durning's to Being," a critical analysis of site-responsive choreographies as social interventions.  

TEACHING 

Rooted in collaboration, community-building, and critical inquiry, Burley’s teaching blends rigorous technical training with creative exploration and contextual study. As a movement artist and pedagogical scholar, she integrates experimental research into the classroom, guiding students to develop as dancers, thinkers, and world-builders. She cultivates inclusive learning environments where students grow artistically and professionally—expanding technical skills, choreographic voices, and pedagogical fluency. Through repertory, improvisation, theory, and mentorship, students engage deeply with diverse perspectives and are consistently recognized for their excellence and growth. Burley’s approach champions discipline and innovation, empowering students to thrive in an evolving dance field. 

Burley’s academic appointments have included a Teaching Fellowship at Smith College, a Teaching Artist-in-Residence position at the University of Maryland, and as guest faculty at SUNY Purchase College and Wesleyan University. She has been on faculty at the Bates Dance Festival, Gibney, USDAN Summer Camp for the Arts, Poly Prep Performing Arts Camp, PAVE Academy, and Cora School for Dance, among other professional, pre-professional, and youth dance programs. She and Springer have taught master classes in Contemporary Technique, Partnering, Contact Improvisation, Composition, and Improvisation nationally and internationally at Kaohsiung Municipal Senior High School and Weiwuying National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts in Taiwan (2024); as cultural ambassadors through the DanceMotion USA program in Argentina, Paraguay, and Peru (2013); and in Budapest, Hungary (2014). Burley has been Assistant Professor in Contemporary Dance Practice at the University of Florida since 2020.