Laura Cannon

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Director

photo by Shannon Butler

Laura Cannon is a dancer, choreographer and educator who has spent over 20 years developing a site-specific performance practice that focuses on cross-disciplinary collaboration and multi-sensory presentation. She is the founder and artistic-director of ProLab Dance. In pursuit of innovative ways to engage with the world around her, Laura leads ProLab collaborators to create and present in non-traditional performance spaces. She seeks a visceral connection to the audience by creating immersive performance environments that weave music, media arts and dance into place, time and community. Laura is a 2023 Oregon Arts Commission Fellow. Her short dance films have been screened and awarded at festivals the world over and she has been recognized for her experiments with virtual and extended reality performance. ProLab’s recent acclaimed and sold-out show Break to Build (July 2023), set in a decommissioned shipyard on the Portland waterfront, will be remounted in the summer of 2024 as the dance company’s experimental shipyard residency continues. Laura holds a BFA with High Honors from the University of Texas at Austin and received the John Bustin Award for Conspicuous Versatility in the Arts from the Austin Critic’s Table in 2006. She has performed with Sharir+Bustamante Danceworks, Deborah Hay Dance, and Blue Lapis Light, among others.