About

Lauren Edson is the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of LED, an arts organization recognized for its cinematic, genre-defying work. A dancer, award-winning choreographer, director, and producer, Edson began her formal training at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts before continuing at The Juilliard School. She spent several years as a celebrated dancer with Trey McIntyre Project before returning to her hometown with the desire to build a community of artists and art-making practices that inspire risk-taking, excellence, and sustainability.

Blending dance, theater, original music, film, and immersive design, Edson creates multidisciplinary works that search for unexpected entry points into storytelling. Her work often embraces tension, contradiction, and vulnerability, using movement, sound, collaboration, and theatricality to explore what it means to be human. Through richly layered performances, she invites audiences into deeply emotional, visceral worlds that illuminate the ineffable aspects of the human experience.

Described by The Seattle Times as “a choreographer of the first rank,” Edson’s work has been commissioned and presented by institutions across the country, including The Kennedy Center, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, White Bird Dance, Northwest Dance Project, San Francisco Dance Film Festival, Dance Camera West, Winspear Opera House, McCallum Theatre, Ballet Idaho, Whim W’Him, Contemporary Dance Wyoming, Open Space, Houston Met Dance, Eisenhower Dance Ensemble, SALT Contemporary Dance, and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, among others.

Her accolades include the 2022 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, a 2021 Alexa Rose Fellowship, two ICA Performing Arts Fellowships (2015, 2021), and the 2019 Washington Award for Excellence in Choreography. She has been the recipient of several choreographic awards including: The Pretty Creatives International Choreography Competition (Northwest Dance Project), Dance Under the Stars Choreography Festival (Grand Prize), Milwaukee Ballet’s Genesis International Choreography Competition (Audience Favorite Award), and Western Michigan University’s Great Works Choreography Prize.

In 2015, Edson co-founded LED with her husband, composer Andrew Stensaas. Since its inception, the company has remained at the forefront of artistic innovation—placing Boise in an ongoing national arts dialogue. LED was named one of Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” and praised by The Seattle Times as “an important addition to the art scene in the Northwest.”

She lives and creates in Boise, Idaho, with her husband, composer Andrew Stensaas, and their two sons, Finn and Liam.