Susan Tenney

Susan Tenney (Modern Dance, Ballet) is an award-winning Director and Choreographer. Her eclectic career has had her working professionally in dance, theatre and film, performing or having her work produced in venues that include the Kennedy Center, Off Broadway, Edinburgh Festival, Williamstown Theatre Festival, La Mama, Florence Gould Hall, Jacobs Pillow, France, Princeton University, and regional theatres including Cincinnati Playhouse, and McCarter Theatre. She received four commissions from the Coalition for Peace Action to create commemorative pieces, and a grant from the Princeton Arts Council to create The Tower a multi-disciplinary work. Her evening-length work Je me Souviens…I Remember was called “stunningly dramatic” by Princeton Patch. In 2020 she was a Resident Artist with New York Stage & Film developing McCourt a new play about the Pulitzer Prize winning memoirist Frank McCourt. She began her dance training at the Princeton Ballet School with Audree Estey and remembers Audree asking her and all the five year olds in the class, to whisper in her ear what “kind” of bird they would like to be, before they “flew” across the studio floor. For Princeton Ballet School she has taught Ballet, Modern Dance, and Choreography to students ages 4 to 84, and set her Mozart Divertimento in F on PBII and students from the Summer Intensive. Her fundraiser for the organization brought over 150 dancers, musicians and community members on to the fields of Princeton University for an outdoor performance featuring her choreography and structured improvisations danced by the community. Her initiative “Got Dance?” was a set of yearly weekend performances which she produced and directed that had the Adult Students of the school dancing in sold out shows in Studio A. She holds a B.F.A. in Dance from SUNY Purchase.