MEDIA
GALLERY
MEDIA
GALLERY
MEDIA
GALLERY
JORDAN
RYDER
ABOUT
Jordan Ryder is a New York City-based choreographer, movement director, intimacy professional, and educator whose work lives at the intersection of contemporary dance, narrative, and visual storytelling. Her choreography explores the body as a multidimensional language- capable of holding character, emotion, memory, humor, and subtext all at once. Drawing from contemporary dance, theatrical physicality, and the visual language of film, Jordan creates movement that is both highly physical and deeply narrative.
A graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Jordan earned a BFA in Dance with minors in Entertainment Business and Sociology and received the Phyllis Lamhut Award for Dance Excellence. Her work has been presented across New York and nationally through commissions, theater productions, festivals, film, and her contemporary dance company, RyderDance, which she founded in 2018. Her choreography has been commissioned by Eryc Taylor Dance, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Rogue Wave Dance, Mélange Dance Company, One Day Dance, and others, with work presented in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and beyond.
Jordan’s work is particularly interested in the relationship between movement and story. Her dance-theater project SHERLOCK, a contemporary adaptation of a Sherlock Holmes television episode, sparked an ongoing exploration of bringing familiar film and television narratives into the language of dance. Through this work, she is interested in creating accessible entry points into contemporary movement while allowing familiar stories to become something stranger, more physical, and more expansive. Her film NEXUS II was an Official Selection of the New York Arthouse Film Festival in 2023.
Her practice also extends into theater, film, and television through movement direction and intimacy choreography. Jordan brings an embodied, consent-forward approach to working with intimate storytelling, drawing on her choreographic practice to create physical structures that are specific, collaborative, and grounded in clear communication. She is currently certification-pending with Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC) as an Intimacy Coordinator for Film and Television. She is interested in intimacy as another form of physical storytelling- one that can reveal character, relationship, power, vulnerability, and connection while honoring performer agency and choice.
As a choreographer and movement director, Jordan has worked across Off-Broadway, regional theater, concert dance, and screen-based projects. She is a proud member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC). As an educator, she has taught at Peridance Center, Ballet Hispánico, Broadway Dance Center, and workshops and intensives nationwide.
At the center of Jordan’s practice is a curiosity about what the body can communicate before, beneath, and beyond words. Whether working in a theater, on a dance stage, or in front of a camera, she creates movement that invites audiences into a story through sensation, gesture, rhythm, and physical connection.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work begins with a question: what happens when movement is allowed to say more than words can?
I’m interested in choreography as a way of building worlds. I use movement, music, rhythm, gesture, and physicality to create work that can hold multiple ideas at once- sometimes clear and narrative, sometimes abstract, strange, funny, or unexpectedly emotional. I’m drawn to the moments when a gesture can reveal something a character hasn’t said yet, or when a familiar image can become something entirely new through the body.
Story is at the center of my practice, but I’m less interested in simply illustrating a narrative than in finding its physical language. I think about movement almost cinematically: how the audience’s eye moves, what is revealed or withheld, where attention lands, and how a shift in rhythm or perspective can change the meaning of a moment. I’m interested in the space between what we understand intellectually and what we feel physically.
I’m particularly drawn to familiar stories, images, and cultural touchstones as starting points. Adapting film and television into dance allows me to take something recognizable and pull it apart- to find the strange, emotional, kinetic, or absurd layers underneath it. I love the tension between accessibility and experimentation, and the possibility of inviting someone into contemporary dance through a door they already know.
My practice is intentionally fluid. I move between concert dance, theater, screen, and other forms of performance, allowing the medium to shape the work rather than the other way around. I’m interested in what changes when choreography moves from a proscenium to a camera, from a live audience to a close-up, or from abstraction into character and story.
Ultimately, I want movement to feel alive: expansive, specific, visceral, and human. I want to make work that invites people to look closer, feel something unexpected, and leave with the sense that they have experienced a story through their whole body.