Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon is an Italian and American choreographer based in New York City. She graduated from Barnard College where she combined evolutionary biology with storytelling and dance to create a self-designed area of study. Raised in Paris, France she trained at the Académie Américaine de Danse de Paris and then in San Francisco at the San Francisco Academy of Ballet. Her work has been staged across the U.S. including at the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theatre in New York City and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco and has been featured in Pointe Magazine, CBS News New York, and Art Spiel. Her mentors are Miro Magloire and Claudia Schreier. She was a 2022 artist-in-residence at the Movement Lab at Barnard College and will be developing a new work in residence at Katsabaan in December 2024. For the past three years she has been commissioned by Norte Maar for their annual CounterPointe series, affording her the opportunity to collaborate with visual artists, musicians, writers, and scientists. Currently, she is working on a series of ‘Fables for the Future’: a collection of stories told through dance, music, and writing inspired by imperiled ecosystems around the world. This series combines her love for science and nature with her desire to create interdisciplinary and immersive shows. An upcoming installment of the series, selected by the NYC Department of Transportation Public Programming and produced by Norte Maar, is a procession through city parks and neighborhoods that honors the waning NYC firefly population. 

The study of animal behavior and her choreographic goal is to understand what makes us inherently human. She wrote her thesis on the evolution of art and storytelling in humans by looking at mating behaviors in birds. Her work is a continuation of this exploration into how and why we, as a species, tell stories and explore how our relatives in the animal kingdom can tell us about ourselves. Art and science are both ways of holding a mirror up to ourselves. Why we get such intense feelings of gratification from participating in and watching dance and why we have such a thirst to tell and consume stories are related questions that she suggests are at the root of what makes us human.