Sometimes, not placing in a competition can lead to an opportunity you never knew you were competing for.
For Los Angeles-based choreographer Isabella Lown, the 2026 A.C.E. Awards became just that. Although the 25-year-old did not take home one of the competition’s three monetary prizes, her striking work, I’m Running Out of Ideas, caught the attention of some special international guests in the audience – representatives from MOVE IT, the world’s biggest dance event.
The A.C.E. Awards were held August 15, as part of The DanceOne Summit in New York City, bringing together 15 choreographers selected from hundreds of submissions to present original work. Judged by Tessandra Chavez, Liz Imperio and JP Christensen, the awards offer choreographers funding to further develop their work, with the first-place recipient receiving $15,000 toward the creation of a full-length production.
This year, Brooke Gilmour took the top honor for If This Is All We Get, while Jessie James, with This Box Is Not a Gift, and Santiago Villarreal, with Somos Inmortales, also received placements and funding toward future work.
But there was another opportunity in the room that night.
Representatives from MOVE IT had travelled from London to attend the event and select a work for a special Spotlight honor. Their choice was Lown’s I’m Running Out of Ideas, earning the young choreographer an invitation to take the piece across the Atlantic and perform at MOVE IT at ExCeL London next March.
For Lown, who has long dreamed of taking her own creative work internationally, the news was almost difficult to take in.
“It’s beyond my comprehension, honestly,” she says. “I am so honored. The more that I hear about the festival, the more I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is crazy.’ It’s been a dream of mine for a long time to do things internationally as myself.”
Lown has previously performed overseas with a company, including at a dance event in Croatia, but this will be different. This time, she will be the choreographer bringing her own dancers and her own work abroad.
“I’ve performed with a company internationally, but I’ve never been the one to bring people internationally,” she explains. “So that’s been a longtime goal of mine, and it happened sooner than I thought.”
And the work that earned her that opportunity is intensely personal.
I’m Running Out of Ideas explores a provocative question: Does an artist need to suffer to make great art? The idea emerged following a difficult breakup. Lown noticed how readily she had transformed the experience into creative material (making a video, studio work and other projects) until she began questioning her own relationship between pain and creativity.
“I realized that I was using this pain in my life to basically drive my career,” she says. “And I had this realization where I was like, ‘If I don’t have this source of inspiration for all of my creativity, what is left?’”
The answer became I’m Running Out of Ideas – what Lown describes as “this giant plea for someone to hurt you so you can make good art.”
The work follows a frantic artist who has exhausted her inspiration and becomes increasingly desperate for something, even emotional pain, that might allow her to create again. The piece begins by posing the question of whether great art requires suffering, before taking the audience deeper into the artist’s increasingly desperate search for inspiration. By the conclusion, she gets precisely what she has asked for, only for the apparent creative victory to reveal something much darker.
“You got what you wanted, right?” Lown says of the unsettling moment. Yet the character is “clearly just so unwell.”
Lown’s creative involvement went far beyond choreography. She constructed the soundtrack herself, sampling and manipulating instrumental tracks, writing additional text and incorporating computer-generated voices before assembling it all. She estimates the final track contains more than 200 separate parts.
“It gives us a creative edge,” she says. “It’s something that people haven’t heard before.”
She created the visual world of the piece, too. Wanting the dancers to evoke a “tortured artist vibe,” Lown experimented with a base costume before hand-painting every garment and spraying them with bleach to make each one distinct. The aim was to create the impression of artists who had almost turned themselves into their own canvases: messy, battle-worn and unapologetically physical.
That desire to have a hand in every element of the work is perhaps unsurprising given the direction Lown’s career has taken.
She grew up dancing at her mother’s studio, Misty’s Dance Unlimited, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. At 16, she made the significant decision to move by herself to Chicago, where she trained at Beyond Words Dance Company with Kate Jablonski while completing her final two years of high school.
After graduating, Lown briefly attended Chapman University before moving to Los Angeles and enrolling in the EDGE Scholarship Program. Just one week after arriving, however, she tore her ACL.
“I was 18. It was horrible,” she recalls. “I thought my life was over.”
After returning home and spending a year rehabilitating the injury, Lown became one of approximately 35 dancers in the inaugural year of CLI Conservatory. She remembers the program in its earliest days, before it grew into the institution it is today. Lown has since returned to teach there herself.
Eventually, she made her way back to Los Angeles. Her original ambition was to pursue the more conventional commercial dancer route, but another career began emerging.
“I moved here to become a backup dancer and do all the normal things: dance in music videos, do commercials, tours,” she says. “And the choreo thing really started taking off for me.”
That momentum led Lown to establish ileven productions, designed to encompass all of her creative endeavors. Rather than maintaining a fixed company roster, she brings dancers together project by project, drawing from artists who have taken her classes or worked with her on previous performances and videos.
Several dancers have become her “OGs,” appearing in project after project, but Lown deliberately avoids demanding exclusivity. She knows that dancers’ schedules and careers change, and wants artists to be able to move in and out of projects as opportunities arise. All of the dancers in her A.C.E. Awards work had collaborated with her previously.
That sense of community was particularly important to Lown going into the A.C.E. Awards.
After entering the Dance Educators Collective Choreographers Cup the previous year with a work she felt extremely confident about and leaving without a placement, she had begun to understand just how subjective choreography competitions can be. So this time, rather than making winning the goal, she consciously changed her focus.
“I was really just trying to focus on the experience with my cast, going in deeper with the cleaning, with the execution of it and focus on enjoying it,” she says.
Lown and her dancers had, in fact, performed at the Choreographers Cup in Nashville the night before travelling to New York for the A.C.E. Awards.
“We did not sleep,” she laughs.
But the whirlwind reinforced what Lown had decided mattered most.
“We can only control ourselves at the end of the day,” she says. “I didn’t place, but that doesn’t take away from the experience and how proud I am of the group.”
As it turned out, recognition came anyway. Just not in the form she had anticipated.
For Lown, the invitation from MOVE IT means far more than adding an international performance to her résumé. It has expanded what she believes might be possible for ileven productions and for the dancers who continue to invest their time and artistry in her work.
Before the A.C.E. Awards, Lown had been wondering what could possibly come next. Bringing 11 dancers across the United States to compete and perform had already felt like a large undertaking. Then London came calling.
“It’s such a cool thing for a door to open that you didn’t know could be opened,” Lown says. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait. We can do more.’ We can do more than just go to New York and compete.”
For a choreographer whose latest work is called I’m Running Out of Ideas, that realization feels particularly fitting.
There is, it seems, plenty more to come.
By Deborah Searle of Dance Informa.
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