Madeline Hollander

Madeline Hollander is a choreographer and artist based in Los Angeles. Her work examines how systems of movement—traffic lights, tides, reflexes—quietly choreograph the world around us. Beginning with observation and ending in translation, she transforms unnoticed gestures into patterns and rhythms into form. Trained in classical ballet, she approaches choreography as a method for mapping the exchanges between body, environment, and machine. In her work, control produces grace. She is represented by Bortolami Gallery, New York, and has exhibited and performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, White Cube, and The Artist’s Institute. For Side Hustle, Hollander presents COUNTDOWN (2025), a new performance commissioned by Kelly Wearstler. Staged within the 1934 James Dolena–designed pool house, the work transforms the site into a live mechanism for measuring time. Eight performers move in looping aquatic sequences, their gestures tracing the logic of anticipation and return. Drawing from Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic choreographies, Hollander reimagines his language of synchronized spectacle as a spatial study—less cinematic fantasy than temporal architecture. Filmed from above and from the ground, COUNTDOWN exists between cinema and performance, imagining choreography itself as a system for keeping time.