Lindsay Gilmour

Lindsay Gilmour is a performer, choreographer, filmmaker, and educator. Her work explores presence, ritual, and rebellion—fusing text, voice, and the moving body. She combines the mystical and the absurd, both honoring and poking fun at the human condition. Her recent projects investigate the relationship between body and earth through the Discipline of Authentic Movement, embodying local landscapes and our need for wild, untamed spaces. Her dance films, which partner with diverse environments including deserts, old-growth forests, oceans, and suburban neighborhoods, have been screened nationally and internationally, most recently at Dance Camera West in Los Angeles, Dance Camera Istanbul, and In Shadow in Lisbon.

Her works for the stage often integrate innovative sets and costumes—live grass, 100 hanging dresses, 200 origami birds, 100 blocks, and a 30-foot wig. Her choreography has been presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; Judson Church at Movement Research and Dixon Place in New York City; the Kitchen Theater, Schwartz Center, and Hangar Theater in collaboration with the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra; and the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in Ithaca, New York. She has been an artist in residence at the Festival de Danza Contemporánea in Managua, Nicaragua, and with OTUX Dance in Santiago, Chile. Her work has also been performed at Body-Mind Centering Conferences in Ghent, Montreal, and Santa Barbara. As a performer, she has toured nationally and internationally with Yin Mei Dance and Pearson/Widrig Dance Theater (PWDT). Most recently, with PWDT, she co-created a site-specific performance and film at Castillo San Cristóbal in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Gilmour is the recipient of a Nehru Fulbright Award for Academic and Professional Excellence (2018) and a Hellman Fellowship (2020–21) for her research on the preservation, adaptation, and innovation of ritual dance in Vajrayana Buddhist nunneries and monasteries in India. She is deeply interested in embodied knowledge and in exploring what ancient dances might share with contemporary somatic movement practices.

She serves on the board of directors of Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery in India and is part of the Core of Cultures research team, dedicated to safeguarding intangible world culture and assisting in the continuity of ancient dance traditions and embodied spiritual practices.