Jesse Zaritt
Jesse Zaritt's work engages drawing as dancing - a visual and physical practice linked to dreaming, drafting, and materializing futures. He is a Brooklyn-based dance artist.
Biography
Zaritt's work engages drawing as dancing - a visual and physical practice linked to dreaming, drafting, and materializing futures. His choreographic, performance, and teaching practices research the ways in which excessive, contemplative, and resistive dance practices change how movement arises in the world and how dancing participates in processes of social transformation. A series of solo works made between 2008 and 2022 interrogate attachments to Jewish ritual and community, seeking to queer dominant paradigms of familial/national belonging, religion, gender, and sexuality.
Zaritt has performed his solo work in Taiwan, Uruguay, Korea, Germany, Japan, Mexico, and throughout the United States. He has performed with Shen Wei Dance Arts and in the work of Netta Yerushalmy and Faye Driscoll; he worked as an artistic adviser for Driscoll's projects through April 2023. Zaritt worked as an Associate Professor at the University of the Arts through June 2024. He currently works in creative dialogue with Bay Area choreographer Sara Shelton Mann.
Zaritt is a visiting faculty member in the BFA in Dance Lab and Low-Residency MFA in Dance program at Bennington for the 2024-2025 academic year.
Photo credit: Robbie Sweeney