Anna Mansbridge, choreographer, dancer and educator, is originally from Australia and the UK and now resides in Seattle, Washington. She holds a First-Class Honors Degree in Dance and Education from Bedford College, UK, and an MFA in Choreography and Performance from Mills College, California. Before emigrating to the US in 1998, Anna co-founded a dance company Footwork OffLimits specializing in blending Modern Dance forms with European Court Dance, and performed and taught in different countries in Europe. In 2000 Anna founded Seattle Early Dance, dedicated to recreating dances from the European Renaissance and Baroque periods. Seattle Early Dance has collaborated with local musicians and performed numerous performances around the Pacific Northwest. Anna has choreographed and directed Early Opera productions in Europe and the USA, including Gluck’s Orphee et Eurydice and Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell with Pacific Musicworks at Meany Theatre, University of Washington; Les Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Lully/Moliere at Cornish Playhouse; and Venus and Adonis by John Blow in Varazdin, Croatia. Anna was the choreographer for Wayward Sisters with Pacific MusicWorks, with four singers and three dancers, to music by seventeenth Italian composers, and choreographer for A Concert with the Countess: Baroque Meets Drag, performed at The Rabbit Box in downtown Seattle. She was a solo performer in Dancing with the Sun King for the Whidbey Island Music Festival summer 2024. She has taught and reconstructed eighteenth century European dances using the Beauchamp-Feuillet notation system at a number of universities, including the University of Washington, Cornish College of the Arts, and Utah Valley University, and she has taught on prestigious early music courses, including Port Townsend Early Music Summer Workshops, San Francisco Early Music, Accademia d’Amore, and the Madison Early Music Course. Anna was the Assistant Stage Director for the Boston Early Music Festival’s 2024 Chamber Opera performances of Telemann’s Don Quichotte in Boston, New York City, and Troy, NY. In June 2025 Anna will be performing in the “Emperor of the Moon” as part of the San Francisco Early Music Society’s Summer Season.
In addition, Anna was Director of Kaleidoscope Dance Company (2014-2023), a youth dance company founded in 1981 by world-renowned dance educator Anne Green Gilbert, and she was on the faculty of the Creative Dance Center (1999-2023) teaching modern, ballet and creative dance to all ages. She has taught in schools and other community settings as an Artist-in-Residence, and leads workshops and training in the BrainDance and Brain-Compatible Dance Education (developed by Anne Green Gilbert) both nationally and internationally. She has co-directed the Summer Dance Institute for Teachers Refresher Course with Creative Dance Center Director Terry Goetz. Anna has taken members of Kaleidoscope Dance Company on international trips with daCi (dance and the Child international) to Taiwan (2012), Copenhagen (2015) and Australia (2018), and she presented workshops at the international conference in Slovenia (2024). She organized the daCi USA Sixth National Gathering at the University of Washington in 2014, and has taken members of Kaleidoscope to National Gatherings in Texas (2011), Utah (2017) and Michigan (2023). Anna joined the daCi USA board in 2009, and was the Chair 2017-2020. She is currently serving a three-year term as Secretary of daCi International.
