Alex Ketley, Choreographer/Co-Artistic Director,
The Foundry
In addition to his role as key faculty member and resident choreographer of the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, Alex is very active as both an independent choreographer and artistic director of the dance company known as The Foundry.
Formerly a member of the San Francisco Ballet and Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet, he retired from dancing full-time in 1998 to co-found The Foundry as a vehicle through which to more deeply explore his interests in choreography, improvisation, mixed media work, and the collaborative process.
For The Foundry, he has created numerous dance, installation, and video works as Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts (California), the Santa Fe Art Institute (New Mexico), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (California), The Yard (Massachussetts), ODC Theater (California), Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan), and the Ucross Foundation (Wyoming)—a body of work that has established for the company a growing reputation within both the dance and fine art communities.
Independent of The Foundry, Alex has created works for Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s main and second companies (which have been performed internationally), Robert Moses’ KIN, BalletMet, and AXIS Dance Company (through the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography’s “Free to Rep” program in Florida), as well as for the dance departments of Stanford University, San Francisco State University, North Carolina School for the Arts and Florida State University.
Alex’s work has received the national Choo-San Goh Award, the inaugural Princess Grace Award for Choreography, and a CHIME Fellowship, as well as awards from the Hubbard Street 2 National Choreography Competition and the International Choreographic Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur in Quebec. He was awarded a grant from the Creative Work Fund to develop a systemic work with California poet Carol Snow, and received funding from the Irvine Foundation to explore California’s diverse cultural and physical landscape through the use of video and improvisation.