Originally from Worcestershire, Emily May trained at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, receiving a First Class Honours Degree in Contemporary Dance in 2017.
Whilst at Laban she performed in a recreation of Matthew Bourne’s Highland Fling, and worked with celebrated choreographers including Ben Wright and Lizzi Kew-Ross.
She has also been closely mentored by choreographer Rosie Kay, which has led to her performing on moving steam trains in Kay’s The Great Train Dance, and joining Rosie Kay Dance Company’s Board of Directors. Most recently, Emily was a dancer in an R&D week for Kay’s future work Fantasia.
Emily established Emily May Dance Theatre in April 2016, and since her choreography has been presented at Ugly Duck (London), Somerville College (Oxford University), The Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and has been commissioned by The Brewery Arts Centre (Kendal).
Passionate about discovering interrelations between her academic and choreographic interests, Emily is a member of the Oxford University based research study, Ancient Dance in Modern Dancers, and has also presented her work at academic conferences at Royal Holloway University (for the Society for Dance Research) and the University of Vienna. Emily also reviews dance and theatre, and has contributed to arts websites A Younger Theatre and Oxford Dance Writers.
She was part of the reviewing team for Resolution Festival 2016, and completed a travel writing internship with City Travel Review in Berlin in August 2017. She has interned at Exberliner magazine (Berlin) and Culture Calling (London).
Emily is now based in Berlin and is passionate about the city’s contemporary and historic cultural scene. She is particularly interested in the art and dance of the Weimar Republic upon which she based her dissertation Republican Automatons: An investigation into artists’ ambivalent relationships with the dehumanising metropolis of 1920s Berlin.