"Ooo-sha"
For over 20 years, Yusha-Marie Sorzano has turned the body into an archive — a living, sensing site where history is carried through breath, gesture, rhythm, and silence. Dancer and scholar, she holds an MFA from NYU Tisch (full scholarship) and has built work spanning the Whitney Museum's Edges of Ailey exhibition to A Ballet Through Mud, an original ballet co-created with RZA (Wu-Tang Clan) and the Colorado Symphony. Her choreographic language collides classical and contemporary ballet, Afro-Caribbean form, modern technique, and social dance — not as interchangeable styles, but as distinct architectures of memory, discipline, and knowing, layered until their friction exposes the paradoxes of identity, diaspora, and survival. She builds ambitious, genre-crossing work from first spark to final bow, presented by leading institutions nationally and internationally.
Ms. Sorzano's talent and drive have been on display since she was 8. She received her primary instruction from the Miami-Dade public school system, including New World School of the Arts, before being accepted with a full scholarship to both Armour Dance Theatre and the Dance Theater of Harlem. In her senior year at New World, she received an award for outstanding choreography and was a National YoungArts Foundation award winner in dance. She went on to attend the Ailey/Fordham BFA Program and by her junior year she was invited to join Ailey II.
And do ask her about that silent Y.
As a Creator,
Ms. Sorzano’s choreographic commissions span major dance companies, museums, and orchestras. For Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, she co-created Testament with Matthew Rushing and Clifton Brown in celebration of the 60th anniversary of Revelations. Her work World Anew, commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark exhibition Edges of Ailey, was later presented at Jacob’s Pillow—home of America’s largest and longest-running international dance festival—as part of Sorzano Dance Works’ 2026 debut. Recent projects also include Suite Release, co-created with Marcus Jarrell Willis for Phoenix Dance Theatre and presented at Sadler’s Wells East, and A Ballet Through Mud, an evening-length ballet created with RZA, founder of Wu-Tang Clan, in collaboration with the Colorado Symphony. Additional commissioners include Nashville Ballet, Ballet Memphis, Ballet Rhode Island, and Repertory Dance Theatre.
A former research fellow with the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division, Ms. Sorzano has held residencies with the Watermill Center, YoungArts, and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s New Directions Choreography Lab, and served as Founding Co-Artistic Director of Zeitgeist Dance Theatre from 2020 to 2025. She is the founder and artistic director of Sorzano Dance Works, a project-based company supporting the creation and presentation of original dance and interdisciplinary performance.
As a Dancer,
As a dancer, Ms. Sorzano has always been hungry to stretch her artistic boundaries by working with new companies and choreographers. She has danced with numerous internationally recognized organizations, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Camille A. Brown & Dancers, and L.A. Dance Project. She has performed in principal roles with the Ailey company and in a wide variety of concert works, including works by noted choreographers Dianne McIntyre, Ulysses Dove, Maurice Béjart, Hofesh Shechter, Kyle Abraham, and Mauro Bigonzetti. Additionally, she has performed alongside recording artists, made film and television appearances, and danced in theater and opera.
As an Educator,
Ms. Sorzano has taught at institutions and festivals from her native Trinidad to the United States and abroad, including Italy’s Opus Ballet and Mostra Dança in Brazil. Her teaching spans ballet, modern, contemporary, Afro-Caribbean forms, social dance, and composition across university, conservatory, and professional training environments. Her pedagogy centers embodied inquiry, compositional rigor, and the ethical stewardship of cultural material, approaching each practice as a distinct movement language shaped by its own discipline, history, rhythm, and way of knowing.
Ms. Sorzano served as Special Faculty at the California Institute of the Arts School of Dance, where she was also appointed Interim BFA Director. She served as Associate Director for Program Development with Francisco Gella Dance Works for ten years and taught with the Joffrey Ballet School for a decade, directing its Dallas Summer Program for one season. She was a Whitney Museum of American Art Youth Insights Fellow and currently serves on the Board of Directors for Flight Path Dance Project, a program offering free dance training and mentorship to New York City students.
