Adrienne Chan is a contemporary ballet choreographer, dancer, and theatermaker based in New York City. Blending the precision and virtuosity of contemporary ballet with a theatrical sensibility, her work investigates dance as a narrative medium.
Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, Adrienne trained at Cleveland City Dance and performed with its pre-professional company, City Ballet of Cleveland. She continued her training at summer intensives with Pacific Northwest Ballet, American Ballet Theatre, Atlanta Ballet, and Kaatsbaan. In 2023, she was a summer trainee at Ohio Contemporary Ballet.
Adrienne graduated magna cum laude with highest honors from Harvard University in 2025, where she studied Sociology and Theater, Dance, and Media.
Her choreographic work includes concert and theatrical dance, musical theater, and interdisciplinary performance. Recent work includes Romeo & Juliet (2024), a full-length contemporary dance-theater adaptation that she directed and co-choreographed. Lauded for its emotional depth and formal ambition, the production was described as a “total artwork… blending choreography, storytelling, and design into a profoundly moving whole—like no Shakespeare we’ve seen before” (The Harvard Independent).
Adrienne has choreographed for numerous productions across Harvard’s Agassiz Theater and the American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center, including Spring Awakening and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Her work has also been performed by the Harvard Ballet Company and the Asian American Ballet Project. Her practice is grounded in collaboration and care—”choreography as a relationship, dance as its language” (The Harvard Crimson).
In recognition of her choreographic and academic work, Adrienne has received the E. John Busser Scholarship, the Harvard Office for the Arts’ Radcliffe Doris Cohen Levi Prize for choreography and musical theater, and the Sociology Department’s Albert M. Fulton Prize for her honors thesis on labor, passion, and precarity in the dance industry.
From Recent Media:
Directed and co-choreographed by Adrienne Chan ’25, it was not a typical retelling. Quite differently, it achieved Chan’s aspirations of embodying the spirit of “gesamtkunstwerk”—a total artwork—to reimagine the familiar: blending choreography, storytelling, and design into a profoundly moving whole—like no Shakespeare we’ve seen before.
Todd Bida, The Harvard Independent
[…]
Chan urged in the Romeo & Juliet program notes: “Feel with us.” And feel we did, with every heartbreak, and every impossible hope. Chan and Luque’s Romeo & Juliet hasn’t just rewritten this classic—it’s rewritten its audience, leaving us ruined for anything less than extraordinary.
A brand-new medium. An age-old story. “Romeo & Juliet,” a contemporary dance-theater adaptation of the classic Shakespearean tragedy, will run at the Loeb Ex from Nov. 14 to Nov. 17. Directed by Adrienne L. Chan ’25 and choreographed by Chan and Jimena M. Luque ’25, this retelling blends ballet and contemporary dance to deliver a love story that is both deeply personal and invokes broad questions of agency, naivety, love, and politics at a time when these issues are more relevant than ever.
Saranya Singh, The Harvard Crimson
Her choreographic process equally conveys her care for those she works with, and the open-mindedness with which she approaches her projects.
Nicole M. Hernandez Abud, The Harvard Crimson
[…]
She aspires to create connections among the various dance and theater groups on campus and burst the separate bubbles in which each exists, promoting her view of choreography as a relationship, dance as its language.
Adrienne Chan 