Paul Gordon Emerson

Paul Gordon Emerson serves as the Research Institute Relations at The Garibay Institute for Soft Power and Public Diplomacy. He is a native New Yorker transplanted to Washington, DC while waiting for his posting to the U.S. Foreign Service. That path was interrupted by a series of Presidential, Senate, Congressional and Gubernatorial campaigns which led him to a long stint as a Legislative Director on Capitol Hill.

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Mr. Emerson is a Guest Lecturer at the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, the training center for U.S. Diplomats. His writings on cultural diplomacy have appeared in the New York Times and his imagery has been published in the Times, the Washington Post, Dance Magazine, and in publications throughout the world.

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As a choreographer his work appears regularly onstage at home and around the world, garning praise from the Post (“heartstopping”) to Ha’aretz in Israel (“breathtaking work”). His belief in the power of art to speak to the issues of our times has led Company | E to create evening-length works on the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King (commissioned by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities), on the Kennedy, Khrushchev years (commissioned by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), 9/11 (in a project featuring 80 dancers from Central Asia in Astana, Kazakhstan, with the support of the U.S. Embassy in Astana) and others.

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He directs Company | E’s film division, Ciné and its experimental work in Augmented Reality and interdisciplinary collaborations between film and stage-craft.

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Mr. Emerson was the founder of CityDance Ensemble, an organization which he led variously as Executive and Artistic Director for the first 15 years of its existence before he, Ms. Pilkington and Ms. Compton formed Company | E. During his tenure at CityDance the organization won five DC Mayor’s Arts Awards, to date the most ever awarded to an organization.

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He was Co-Host of the Addy-Award-Winning “Performance Moves” cable television news magazine for four years, and has been, at points in time in his life, a radio disk jockey, news director and free-lance photographer.

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He dabbles in sculpture, illustration and design. Alongside his responsibilities at Company | E, Mr. Emerson was also the first Executive Director of the Dance Loft on 14, in which he oversaw the design and renovation of the former movie house into a four studio facility. He has designed dance studio spaces and theaters in DC, Maryland and overseas.