Rachel Damon

Rachel Damon weaves together roles as an arts maker and manager; she is a choreographer, dancer, needleworker, and theatrical designer. Co-founder and current Director of Synapse Arts, a dance-theater company established in Chicago in 2004, Rachel received the Albert P. Weisman Award in Choreography and a residency at The Chicago Cultural Center to begin her career and has since presented internationally with Synapse Arts, Erica Mott Productions, Breakbone Dance, and The Anatomical Theatre.

Since 2009, Damon has co-curated collision_theory with musician Dan Mohr—improvisation performances that orchestrate "blind dates" onstage between musicians and movers. Damon began working with Mohr when they co-directed Stridulate: hybrid forms in voice and movement in 2007, a Synapse performance named one of NewCity's "Top Ten Performances of the Year" and presented at The Roy Hart Centre in France.

In 2010, Damon was awarded a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist grant, which supported the development of her first evening-length piece,  Factor Ricochet and brought a deeper focus to her work as a choreographer/director. Factor Ricochet was developed through a residency with the Chicago Artists Coalition and a grant from The Cliff Dwellers Arts Foundation. In 2012, Damon was supported by the Illinois Arts Council and a MetLife New Stages For Dance grant to create Without Pause, a water-soaked piece that was presented by The Dance Center of Columbia College.

Damon collaborated with Manual Cinema's Julia Miller in 2013 to create Swath. Supported by Links Hall’s Midwest Nexus Program, Swath was touted as "the kind of art that artists and audiences move to big cities for" by NewCity. Swath was presented at Links Hall, The Cowles Center (Minneapolis), the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Most recently, Rachel presented You’re So Stubborn, a work that studied the embodiment of deception and was commissioned by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events. The piece started during a residency at the Ragdale Foundation in 2013, and premiered at The Storefront Theater in May 2015.

Today, Rachel is a Teaching Artist with The Chicago Park District (where Synapse is an Arts Partner in Residence) and freelances as a lighting designer and stage manager. Featured in Dance Spirit Magazine for her career that bridges onstage and backstage, she has designed and produced with Grammy-winners eighth blackbird, Columbia College Chicago, and Links Hall, among many others.