Anna Mansbridge

Baroque dancer and choreographer

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. 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. 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.

In addition, Anna is Director of Kaleidoscope Dance Company, a youth dance company founded in 1981 by world-renowned dance educator Anne Green Gilbert, and she has been on the faculty of the Creative Dance Center teaching modern, ballet and creative dance to all ages since 1999. She has taught in schools and other community settings as an Artist-in-Residence, and leads workshops and training in the BrainDance and Brain-Compatible Dance Education (developed by Anne Green Gilbert) both nationally and internationally. She co-directs the Summer Dance Institute for Teachers Refresher Course with Creative Dance Center Director Terry Goetz.  Anna has taken members of Kaleidoscope Dance Company on international trips with daCi (dance and the Child international) to Taiwan (2012), Copenhagen (2015) and Australia (2018). She organized the daCi USA Sixth National Gathering at the University of Washington in 2014, and has taken members of Kaleidoscope to National Gatherings in Texas (2011) and Utah (2017). Anna joined the daCi USA board in 2009, and was the Chair 2017-2020. She will be the next Secretary of daCi International, starting July 2022.