Annie-B Parson is an American choreographer, dancer, and director based in Brooklyn, New York. Parson is notable for her work in dance/theater, post-modern dance, and art pop music. Parson is the Artistic Director of Brooklyn's Big Dance Theater, which she founded with Molly Hickok and her husband, Paul Lazar. She is also well known for her collaborations with Mikhail Baryshnikov, David Byrne, David Bowie, St. Vincent, Laurie Anderson, Jonathan Demme, Ivo van Hove, Sarah Ruhl, Lucas Hnath, Wendy Whelan, David Lang, Esperanza Spalding, Mark Dion, Salt ‘n Pepa, Nico Muhly, and the Martha Graham Dance Co. Early life and education Parson received her BA in Dance from Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut in 1980. She received her Master's degree Columbia University/Teacher's College in 1983. Big Dance Theater Parson founded Big Dance Theater in 1991 with Molly Hickok and Paul Lazar. She has since choreographed and co-created dozens of works for the company, ranging from pure dance pieces to adaptations of plays and literature, to original works combining wildly disparate materials. Her work with Big Dance has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The National Theater of Paris, The Japan Society, and The Walker Art Center. Parson describes Big Dance as "a group of people who are interested in pushing dance into the theatrical realm and pushing theater into the dance realm." To her, Big Dance has a "total greediness for all the pleasures of theater and dance" Critic Helen Shaw wrote of Big Dance as a "fluid gang of performers and designers clustered around the married co-directors, choreographer-director Annie-B Parson and actor-director Paul Lazar. The company is – as it says on the bottle – a hybrid group, ignoring customary divides between dance and theatre." The Company began as a loose but dedicated and generative alliance, made up largely of women including Stacy Dawson, Molly Hickok, Tymberly Canale, Cynthia Hopkins, Rebecca Wisocky, and Kourtney Rutherford. This group ebbed and flowed with others joining in over the years. The work of Big Dance is almost always non-linear, and frequently disinclined to have a narrative ("I don't think life is very narrative," Parson says. "Mine isn't. And the narrative elements that have happened in my life, as I look back on them, become more fictionalized.") Though the lack of a linear story occasionally leaves critics bewildered, the intentionality, playfulness, technical precision and the ambitious scope of the worlds they