Annie Sailer in her Erector Square studio during City-Wide Open Studios in October 2021. Charlotte Hughes File Photo.
In the video, the dancer is the first thing you notice, standing tall and still in the center of the studio’s wood floor. Behind her, a white sheet is fitted over the exit sign, its glow subdued. Light flits in pools and patches over the room; M.I.A.’s “Milchreiter” is loud and heartbeat-like in its persistence. When she begins to move, arms outstretched, she is so deliberate, so certain in her movements, that you can’t take your eyes off of her.
She raises her arms and spins, bringing her palms back down to her waist, and it feels like an offering.
The figure is Annie Sailer, a dancer, dance educator, and prolific abstract painter who died in Hamden in June of this year, at the age of 74. Five months after her death from ovarian cancer, the city’s arts community is taking time to mourn her, from missing her at City-Wide Open Studios to a new dance class that has formed in her honor at the Dixwell Community Q House.
On a recent Sunday, friends, family and fellow artists gathered to honor and celebrate her life in the Carriage House at Edgerton Park, as rain fell gently outside. She is survived by her daughter, Phoebe Hinton, her siblings, Jeffrey Greene, Katherine Sailer, Henry Sailer, Randolph “Ran” Sailer, Valerie Spain, and Elizabeth Sailer, and several nieces and nephews.
“She is one of the most herself people I’ve ever met,” said the artist and curator Maxim Schmidt, who became very close with Sailer in the last years of her life, and worked on the final dance performance she choreographed last year. “Every bit of Annie was Annie. She was always chasing the evolution of herself. To be able to be a witness to someone like her, I feel so lucky.”
“You didn’t mess around with Annie,” said dancer Elaine O’Keefe, who met Sailer in the 1980s, and reconnected with her when she returned to New Haven over a decade ago. “To me, she always was very consistent in the pursuit of her art and how she saw the world … She was truly a creative force. Nothing would stop her. She would always say, I’m gonna do what we do.”
Images and documents courtesy Phoebe Hinton.
Sailer’s life, which left artistic footprints across the country, began in Princeton, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Even in those early years, “she was very warm and very sweet,” her younger sister Elizabeth remembered. “We were all sort of naturally fierce, and she was just sweet.”
Dance, even then, was often her refuge: Sailer started dancing on her own by kindergarten, and didn’t stop until the final weeks of her life. In the first grade, she branched out to formal ballet classes, and soon after “started choreographing and making up dances” before she even had the language for it, she said in an interview on WNHH Community Radio last year. For her, even then, dance was never just a hobby; it was a basic need.
“Sometimes there’d be tap dances, sometimes there’d be, I don’t know, all kinds of stuff,” she remembered in that 2024 interview. “More musical theater kind of movement, and I continued to do that.”
The older Sailer got, the deeper she ventured into dance and choreography. After stopping ballet in middle school, she picked up modern dance, working with the late Erika Thimey in D.C. Thimey, a German-born dance educator who believed that dance could transform the way young people engaged with the world around them, became a role model in Sailer’s young life.
During those years, she was also increasingly interested in the work of her biological father, George Sears Greene, an abstract expressionist painter with whom she connected when she was in her teens (Hinton, lifting a painting of her mother’s on a sticky day in August, noted the visual similarities between the two). Years later, Greene’s legacy would very much live on through her, in hundreds of paintings that Sailer completed during her lifetime.
By the 1970s, it led her to St. Louis, where she pursued a BFA in painting at Webster College, and studied dance at Washington University in St. Louis. At Washington University, she returned to ballet, while also deepening her work in the Nikolais and Graham techniques. Of the latter two, both are modern techniques born in the early and mid twentieth century, by pioneers Alwin Nikolais and Martha Graham.
It would be less than a decade until her personal life brought her to New Haven for the first time, and less than five until Sailer launched the first performance of her eponymous dance company in Washington, D.C. in 1977. For a while, she moved home, an anchor for a then-teenage Elizabeth who had missed her cool older sister. Outside of the house, she kept dancing, slowly building a network of young choreographers and collaborators that she maintained for years to come.
“I remember, she told me, ‘It gets better with every decade,’” said Elizabeth at her memorial, conjuring the bedroom that Sailer made utterly her own during those years. In hindsight, the phrase would seem funny to her, because Sailer was only in her 20s, and hadn’t lived all that many decades herself. At the time, though, it was exactly what she needed to hear.
“She just had a sweetness to her that the rest of our tribe didn’t have,” Elizabeth said.
During those years, Sailer taught dance in the Washington, D.C. area, and ultimately earned her graduate degree in dance at George Washington University (she also continued painting, and for many years also branched into ceramics). She also began to showcase the work of her dance studio, including a piece called “Salt Stone Start” that in 1981 landed a grant from the state’s Commission on the Arts & Humanities.
Elizabeth “Buffy” Price, now a professor emeritus at George Mason University, crossed paths with Sailer at GWU in 1979. The two became quick friends and collaborators, performing multiple concerts together.
“She was just so very sensitive, intuitively sensitive,” Price said, remembering a handmade mug that Sailer had gifted her during those years. The mug, which Sailer had pressed a hand to before it was fired, still includes a perfect fingerprint on the handle. “I think she was just an artist in the way she approached life. There wasn’t anything that wasn’t imbued with her artistry.”
Sailer with her classes in Hamden last year, before what became her final performance. Maxim Schmidt Photo.
Sailer was also fairly unflappable, Price remembered. Just before a performance at All Souls Church in the early 1980s, Sailer’s drummer dropped out. Sailer, unbothered, enlisted Price to help with the soundscape. It didn’t matter to her that Price had no musical experience: they two made it work. “She just rolled with it. That was our friendship,” Price remembered.
In those years, Sailer also crossed paths with the budding historian Robert Hinton, a son of North Carolina whose doctoral research at Yale ultimately brought them both to New Haven in the early 1980s. After meeting at a jazz concert that he had produced in Washington, D.C., , the two fell in love, and remained together until his death in 2023.
During those years, Sailer would cultivate the beginnings of what Phoebe called “my mom’s ability to connect and to build community wherever she went.” In 1983, she and Hinton moved to New Haven, where he began his doctoral studies at Yale. Before long, she had started to build a home for modern dance in the city, where she taught classes for just $6 out of a studio at 817 Chapel St.
Biologist and dancer Lynn Cooley, who met Sailer after moving to New Haven in 1984, remembered that time as one of innovation and explosive creativity, where she was thrilled to have a home for modern dance.
“She was just an artist through and through,” said Cooley, who stayed in New Haven and now runs a lab at the Yale School of Medicine. The longer the two knew each other, the more deeply Cooley also fell in love with Sailer’s paintings, many of which adorn her New Haven home and her office. “She was an artist with just endless amounts of creativity. Just irresistible. That’s who she was and she poured everything into it. And kind of fearless in those ways.”
Sailer in her studio during City-Wide Open Studios a few years ago. Helen Kauder Photo.
O’Keefe, who spent a career in public health in New Haven, agreed. In 1983, she met Sailer when she “walked into her class on a Saturday morning,” and looked around to get a feel for what was going on. Sailer, as stern as she was warm, welcomed O’Keefe immediately, excited to have her in the space despite a lack of formal dance experience.
“All the time I’d say to Annie, ‘I have no technique and I’d always discourage my lack of training,’” she remembered. “And Annie would say ‘Oh no, you’re refreshing.’”
“She didn’t have an elitist bone in her body,” O’Keefe added at Sailer’s memorial. After just six months dancing in the studio, O’Keefe was shocked when Sailer asked her to be in a performance. When reviews came in criticizing the dancers as “untrained and unprepared,” Sailer shrugged it off. “Annie didn’t flinch at that.”
During those years and into the present, one of her strongest suits was the ability to turn any location into a performance venue. In addition to the Chapel Street studio, Sailer brought her craft to multiple stages and sanctuaries, including the Episcopal Church of St. Paul and St. James in Wooster Square in 1984, and the ECA Arts Hall on Audubon Street shortly thereafter.
Because “she really wanted us to focus”—Sailer had a clean, fluid aesthetic, and expected her dancers to, too, O’Keefe remembered—she would arrive at the church with “reams and reams of dropcloth,” ready to turn the Chapel Street sanctuary into a haven for dancers. Once she had put them up, then she and others were ready to dance.
She worked with then-emerging artists, from composers like Bill Brown and David Hicks to a then-baby-faced Jamie Burnett. She presented sweeping works and small ones too, excited for any space that would take the company, and eager to teach up a flight of stairs on Chapel Street. She kept welcoming dancers, several of whom stayed through the early 1980s, and then returned to her decades later.
During those years, Sailer also made time to dance in New York, including with the Nancy Meehan Dance Company. Meehan, a student of Erick Hawkins who had split off from his dance company, was a pillar of twentieth-century modern dance, and passed much of that on to her students. When Sailer joined, the group was still performing at St. Mark’s Church in New York City. It became one of the cultural pillars in Sailer’s life and work.
“My relationship with Annie was very physical because it was on the dance floor,” said the Rev. Mary Barnet, who later danced alongside Sailer in New York and remembered Meehan’s influence vividly. When she thinks of Sailer now, it's her lithe, powerful form that comes to mind, from ”her haunches, her beautiful haunches” to the way her hands, arms and knuckles sliced through the space around her.
“There are times we sat in the studio, and we thought about life, or philosophy,” Barnet added. “It’s a part of the world we shared together.”
Sailer with a then-young Phoebe, teaching her and her classmates in Ohio in the early 90s. Phoebe is in the pink turtleneck and flower-patterned leggings. Photos Contributed by Phoebe Hinton.
When Hinton’s doctoral work led back to North Carolina in the late 80s, Sailer brought her experience in dance too, immersing herself in dance education across the Research Triangle. While living in Durham, she performed at Duke University and in the North Carolina Choreography Project, a collaboration that brought her together with names like Diane Eilber, Marianne Adams and Marjorie Scheer. She began teaching in the Wake County Schools and at a studio in Chapel Hill, where the main campus of the University of North Carolina is based.
She kept innovating, with works that explored the porous and changing boundaries of modern dance (there was, for instance, “The Mind of A Room Changes,” a work in progress performed to vibraphone, electric guitar and synthesizer on Duke’s East Campus in 1987). Or as she told a reporter for the Durham Morning Herald in 1988, her work was meant to conjure “an internal body-mind space … where your mind can go with dreams and different feelings and thoughts.”
After North Carolina, Hinton and Sailer relocated to small-town Ohio, where he could teach at Kenyon College, and then to Laramie, Wyoming in the late 1990s. As she became a mom, she remained dedicated to her craft, whether it was teaching amongst Phoebe’s young classmates or finding a church or spot (including, Phoebe remembered, the back of a karate studio in small-town Ohio) where she and her dancers could perform.
“We lived in so many small places and everywhere we went, my mom found an artistic community, and often it was an artistic community that she built from the ground up,” Phoebe remembered at her memorial.
Indeed, programs and article clippings from that time in Sailer’s life show a record of new works and dance education that stretch from a Kenyon College field house to a psych unit in Mount Vernon, Ohio to performance venues in Laramie where she also taught adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Together, they paint a portrait of an artist doggedly dedicated to her craft, for whom no space was too small or too out-of-bounds to dance in.
Helen Kauder Photo.
In the early 2000s, the couple moved to New York City, in what would become a revelatory space and time for both Sailer and her career. As Hinton became a well-known scholar of history and Africana Studies at New York University, Sailer shaped a new version of her company, while also returning to the work from Meehan that she loved. She navigated the city as a dancer, an abstract painter, and a mom, with a deep reverence for the other artists in her orbit.
“I don’t think either of my parents hid their human-ness from me,” Phoebe said in an interview in late August, at the Hamden home Sailer lived in for just over a decade. “It meant that I was able to be human.”
When Sailer returned to teach in New Haven around 2013 (at the time, she was still also doing work in New York City, which she continued to do until the Covid-19 pandemic forced her to move everything temporarily onto Zoom), she was thrilled to find that several of her former students were still in New Haven and Connecticut. Within months, she had found a painting studio in Erector Square, where hundreds of her canvases took shape.
As she worked, Sailer deepened her own abstract style, with a bent toward shocking, bright pinks, greens and blues that Maxim Schmidt later referred to as quintessentially “Annie colors.”
Around her, the city had changed many times over: tenants in her old building, many of them artists, had been kicked out to make space for luxury apartments. She moved across the city, finding studio spaces in Erector Square and later, Your Community Yoga Center in Hamden (O’Keefe, delighted at how much of an aesthetic purist Sailer was, remembered how much she hated the studio’s red exit sign enough to hang a sheet over it). Half a dozen dancers joined her.
Annie Sailer watches her company members rehearse in 2024. Maxim Schmidt Photo.
“You know, we’re not 20 year olds [anymore], but we’re an extremely powerful group of dancers,” Sailer said on WNHH in 2024, shortly before her debut of a new work, “fall down past my shoulder weighted with light” (read about that here and here). “We have a long history of them studying technique with me.”
Dancers soaked in the ability to be in Sailer’s studio again, and she savored the ability to teach them. O’Keefe, who was by then in her 60s, remembered initially balking at the idea of dancing, worried that she’d gotten too old and too out of practice. Sailer, who was the same age, shrugged it off and welcomed her with open arms.
That was part of her philosophy, she later explained: she believed not only that anyone could dance, if they had the interest and the dedication, but also that everyone deserved to dance if they wanted to. It was, in many ways, how she saw the world. Or as dancer Ginger Chapman put it, “she was our dance teacher but she was also our friend and our advisor.”
“During that time, we became more friendly, and she had good personal relationships with her dancers,” O’Keefe said. While decades had passed, Sailer slipped right back into the greater New Haven community, bringing her technique and approach to City-Wide Open Studios in 2015, when a weekend still unfolded at the Goffe Street Armory.
Helen Kauder, who at the time was the executive director of Artspace New Haven, remembered what a thrill it was to work with her that year, and again in 2019, when Sailer collaborated with the artist Howard el-Yasin at Yale’s West Campus.
Until its closure in 2022, Artspace hosted CWOS (after Kauder’s tenure, the name changed to the Open Source Festival, but a celebration of art and artists remained). It became an artist-led effort, in which Sailer continued to participate, from 2022 onward.
“She was just a gentle soul, and she just had a kind of quiet poise,” Kauder said in a recent Zoom interview. “She was very serious, but like, a serious sense of purpose.”
She also continued painting, with a dedication to the form—and belief in the work itself—that was uncompromising, and still somehow always made room for younger artists. In 2013, she crossed paths for the first time with the artist Allison Hornak, who was still very early in their career.
Hornak, who now works out of a studio at Erector Square, had launched “a non-commercial, experimental space” in their hometown of Sandy Hook. When they found Sailer’s work through research on area artists, they were amazed, and reached out with no expectation that the artist would respond. Instead, Sailer invited Hornak over to her home, to look through canvases in her basement.
While “she had that elder aura about her,” Sailer was never condescending or standoffish, genuinely interested in the work that Hornak was doing and the way the artist was thinking about art. The more time the two spent together, the closer they became.
“We talked about everything,” Hornak remembered in a recent phone call. “We talked about relationships and the world and loss and pain. We became really close friends.”
“Se was constantly seeking feedback,” Hornak added. “It didn’t matter that there was an age difference. It really felt like two people dialoguing with each other … I just think about Annie and the way she made me feel in her presence.”
Schmidt, who first met Sailer when she did a performance at the exhibition Our Bodies, Ourselves at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in 2019, shared that kind of reverence. In 2021, two years after they had first crossed paths, the two reconnected when Sailer was looking for a social media assistant. Schmidt soon found that it was more than a part-time job: it was an intergenerational friendship in which he felt completely seen and understood.
Sailer's work in the 2025 exhibition Nosegay at the Institute Library. Maxim Schmidt Photo.
“I’ll never forget this day when I walked into her house, and she was like, ‘Maxim, you look so handsome. You look like you,’” he remembered. Schmidt, who has spent years working on how to present himself in the world, was bowled over by the statement. In many ways, that was Sailer’s gift: she was incredibly, sharply perceptive, whether it was in her art or in her life.
“She was the keeper of some of my deepest, darkest secrets,” Schmidt said, with no hint of irony in his voice. Often, the two would spend an hour catching up before they got into the latest project, whether it was sound design for a performance to a website that she curated carefully in the last years of her life. “We had our own little ecosystem of how to make things.”
That ecosystem always made space for other artists, he added. Even after Sailer’s cancer diagnosis in 2023, she continued dancing, scheduling her chemo sessions around her teaching schedule. For months, she and dancers worked diligently on an upcoming performance, with structured improvisations and a fully choreographed dance. When she folded in a solo, they were delighted: she rarely danced by and for herself.
In the solo, which runs just over five minutes, Sailer stands in a long denim shirt, her hair a cropped shock of white. To M.I.A.’s “Milchreiter,” she begins to move, with such intention that the dance is nearly a series of freeze frames. She raises a leg, and lowers right into a lunge. She spins, arms extended, wraps them around her, and then extends them again. She glides across the floor, her movements slow, until she lowers her body to the floor and tries to rise. Then the cycle begins again.
“She wasn’t quitting, and just pushed through all of that,” said Cooley, who was in that final performance. “We all got to see her dance. A big part of that performance was getting to watch her dance, and knowing what she’d been through, it was stunning.”
What she leaves, then, is a legacy of living entirely as oneself, because there is no other option. Schmidt, who has several of her paintings in his home (including an unfinished canvas of a dog that he has loved for years), also remembered watching Sailer dance last November, in what became her last solo and public performance. She was, just as she had always been, majestic.
“Everything that she touched felt like her,” Schmidt said. “It was just another part of loving her. I truly loved her. There is a gaping hole where she was.”
An interview with Annie Sailer and Maxim Schmidt, taped in October 2024, is above.