Rosalie Purvis holds a BA in (Literature/Dance) from Bard College (Ana Itelman Prize for Innovative Choreography) and an MFA in Theatre Directing from Brooklyn College (Teaching Excellence Fellowship). Her work has been featured in NYC at, among others, the Atlantic Theatre’s Second Stage, Theatre for the New City, the Brick Theatre, Dixon Place, the Estrogenius Festival, the Culture Project, the Henry Street Settlement, 59 East 59, the Abingdon Theatre, the Puerto Rican Traveling Company, Dance New Amsterdam, 78th Street Theatre Lab and the Brooklyn Arts Exchange. She has created site specific works in various spaces in Southern Vermont, NYC, Philadelphia, and her native city of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
She has taught acting, directing, dramaturgy, (site specific) performance composition, collaborative models, script/libretto writing, movement, theatre history, creative/academic writing, most recently at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Baruch College, Mercy College, Lehman College, Pace University, Brooklyn College, Fairleigh Dickinson University, the Putney School Summer Program and Marlboro College where she served as guest director/professor of theatre in fall, 2014.
While she began her career as movement choreographer/director of large-scale productions such as Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Setzuan, she began to facilitate new play development with writers such as Jacob M. Appel, Mya Kagan and T.D. Mitchell and queer and polyglot solo show development, such as Eduardo Leanesz and Patrick Horrigan's “Tu Estas Confundido”.
She is currently pursuing her Phd at Cornell University in the Performing and Media Arts Department where she focuses on transgressive cross-cultural and cross-lingual borders, politics and performance.