Anna Mansbridge

Anna Mansbridge, choreographer, dancer and educator, is originally from Australia and the UK and now resides in Seattle, Washington. She holds a First-Class Honours Degree in Dance and Education from Bedford College, UK, and an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Mills College, California. Before emigrating to the US in 1998, Anna co-directed an early dance company, and performed and taught in different countries in Europe. In 2000 Anna founded Seattle Early Dance, dedicated to recreating dances from the European Renaissance and Baroque periods. Seattle Early Dance has collaborated with local musicians and performed numerous performances around the Pacific Northwest. Anna has choreographed and directed Early Opera productions in Europe and the USA, including Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice and Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell with Pacific Musicworks at Meany Theatre, University of Washington; Les Bourgeois gentilhomme by Lully/Moliere at Cornish Playhouse; and Venus and Adonis by John Blow in Varazdin, Croatia. Most recently Anna choreographed “Wayward Sisters” with Stephen Stubbs and Pacific MusicWorks, with four singers and three dancers, to music by seventeenth century Italian composers. She has taught and reconstructed eighteenth century European dances using the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation system at a number of universities, including the University of Washington, Cornish, and Utah Valley University, and she has taught on prestigious early music courses, including Port Townsend Early Music Summer Workshops, San Francisco, Accademia d’Amore at Cornish, and the Madison Early Music Course.