Led by twin choreographers Hilary Brown-Istrefi and Briana Brown-Tipley, Same As Sister (S.A.S.) is a New York City- and Toronto-based performance collective celebrating 11 years of collaborative and interdisciplinary storytelling. Their performance and film commissions have been presented and screened internationally at The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (Toronto); Base: Experimental Arts + Space (Seattle); Archaeological Museum of Messenia (Greece); Centre d'Art Marnay Art Centre (France); Danspace Project, BRIC, and New York Live Arts (NYC), among other venues. S.A.S. is currently a resident of the HERE Artist Residency Program and Guest Curators at Dancemakers, supporting the creation of Upstairs, In Our Bedroom, slated to premiere in 2026. Dance/choreography awards include Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts’ 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Award Nominee for Outstanding Production (This is NOT a Remount); Jerome Foundation’s 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow Finalist and Alternate; Foundation for Contemporary Arts' Emergency Grantee (2022 and 2017); Queens Council on the Arts' Queens Arts Fund 2020 New Work Grantee; and New York State Council on the Arts' New York Foundation for the Arts 2019 Artist Fellow.

Artist Statement

Rooted in our multi-racial, national, and artistic backgrounds, we aspire to challenge, dismantle, and reimagine representations of identity towards a deeper understanding of our individual and collective histories. We want our work itself—created with a diversity of disciplines, individuals, dance traditions, and somatic languages—to be an act of exchange; exchange of ideas, modalities, and between a work and its audience. This dynamic employs friction and contradictions as entry points to both new aesthetic explorations and cross-cultural discourses.

Employing a truly interdisciplinary approach to choreography, our work relies on collaborative and experimental practices within the performing arts to retell familiar stories in unfamiliar ways. Through the construction and deconstruction of narrative, languages of gesture, and visual environments, we explore the space where real and imagined characters intersect. Drawing inspiration from an eclectic compilation of sources that cover the quotidian, literary, and cinematic, we apply a meticulous level of detail to our creative research to exploit the aesthetic and conceptual power of live performance.

Full Resume (PDF)