Sarah Yasmine Marazzi-Sassoon is a New York-based director and choreographer interested in humans and other strange animals. Her work challenges anthropocentrism by placing animal behavior at the center of meaning-making and investigates human behavior through the lens of our animal relatives. She graduated from Barnard College where she combined evolutionary biology with storytelling and dance to create a self-designed area of study. Her choreographic and scientific goals are to understand what makes us human by exploring how and why we, as a species, tell stories and what our relatives in the animal kingdom can tell us about this process. 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. She is currently an apprentice with The Tango Company under Carlos Cañedo, and a Co-creative Director for composer/performer Jude Icarus. Her mentors are Claudia Schreier and Miro Magloire. 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. She was an artist-in-residence at the Movement Lab at Barnard College and started 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 that seeks to honor, memorialize, and advocate for imperiled ecosystems and species. The first 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 focuses on the waning NYC firefly population. It was performed in September 2024 in Highland Park BK, and for the Columbus/Amsterdam BID in NYC. She is fiscally sponsored by The Field.