Ashley Cook
Ashley Cook
Ashley Cook is a professional dancer, teacher and choreographer splitting her time between the Bay Area and Southern California. Her creative work centers on identity, with the concepts of positioning and identity in flux as major catalysts for her research. She is interested in how identity is shaped by where we are, who we are with, how we are seen, and maintains that identity is something we move through and negotiate in real time. She upholds that rupture, breaks in lineage, language, and belonging change how we understand ourselves.
Her process often combines live performance and film, building movement from personal and collaborative sources, often asking dancers to translate emotions, memories, or personal discoveries into choreography. This allows the work to hold multiple perspectives at once, reflecting the layered and often contradictory nature of identity. She makes use of repetition, stillness, and shifts in dynamics, along with framing and fragmentation in film to question visibility.
Ashley earned her MFA in Dance at the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts, where she taught, performed and cultivated her passion for creative movement research in contemporary, modern, ballet, contemporary ballet, hip hop, and jazz. Ashley is a former company member with the contemporary dance company TwoPoint4 Dance Theatre. Before dancing with TwoPoint4, she graduated from Santa Clara University with Bachelor of Arts degrees in Dance and Communication.
Current Work
Her latest creative works can be found at www.ashleycookdance.com/film.
Dance for All
Modern Contemporary I
Modern Contemporary I/II
Hip Hop
Images choreographer