Pearlann Porter is an improvisational performing artist, visual-conductor, physical-poet and experimental filmmaker. She is a passionate instigator of new ideas in dance and an investigator of physical expression. 

Pearlann is the Founding Artistic Director of the improvisationally-based dance company The Pillow Project (est. 2004) and is also the Founding Director of The Space Upstairs (est. 2006), where she and her partner John Lambert are permanent full-time Resident Artists and the regular hosts/creators of the long-running Second Saturdays jazz-happenings and The Invisible Jazz Labs scientist x artist improvisational-lecture series. 

Through The Pillow Project at The Space Upstairs, Pearlann often creates performances without the formal division of a traditional stage so that intimate, inclusive interactions can occur with her audiences, helping her in building a creative community in all directions. ‘Postmodern-Jazz Dance’, to her, is a verb and creation method. The Space Upstairs is both her laboratory for navigating artistic risks and her forum for innovating new audience experiences.

Pearlann continues to represent herself as a contemporary artist of a new American modern-jazz dance driven by the concept that jazz is a partnering of music with dancers as physical musicians: Dancers articulate sound into visual motion to share another live dimension of ‘jazzing the music’.

Pearlann has been teaching and creating from her own postmodern-jazz dance philosophy and improvisational language — THE ELLIPSIS CONDITION™ — for over 20 years. Through The Pillow Project, she has extensive creation and self-production experience, having entirely self-organized and produced large-scale performance events such as at The Hunt Armory (The Concept Album – 2005), the first-ever all-day dance event at The Carrie Furnace (The Jazz Furnace – 2013), and the recurring performance series on the public streets (Thought Pockets – Downtown Pittsburgh, NYC, Paris, London, Dublin). She has also autodidactically created two original video projection methods to illuminate her dance — “Luminography” and “Light-Specific Projection” — both which are simultaneously low-tech and visually unusual applications to lighting design for dance. 

​She holds a BFA in Dance from Point Park University where she has also been on dance faculty for 20+ years teaching postmodern-jazz improvisation, modern dance and dance composition. She has held artist residencies and/or created original work for The Dance Alloy Theater, August Wilson Center Dance Ensemble, Xpressions Dance Company, University of Southern Mississippi, University of Pittsburgh, Slippery Rock University, Dance Conservatory of Pittsburgh, Point Park University, LABCO Dance, and TEDxGrandviewAve. Pearlann was named one of Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch in 2010, Pittsburgh Post Gazette’s Best in Dance (2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014), Pittsburgh Magazine’s Best of the ‘Burgh (2013, 2018), and has been six-times nominated for the Carol R. Brown Creative Achievement Award. 

More at: pillowproject.org