Biography

Born in New York City, Haim began studying classical piano at age 6, and attended the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory Division, where, in addition to studying piano with Rosetta Goodkind, he studied theory, composition and chamber music. He was accepted to the Dance Division of The Juilliard School on an honorary scholarship, graduating with a BFA degree in 1983. He received his MFA in Dance in 2006, in the first graduating class of the Hollins/ADF MFA program.

From 1984 -1987, he directed Mark Haim & Dancers, which performed at the Riverside Dance Festival in NYC, and at various theaters and venues in the US, Luxembourg, and Holland. From 1987-1990, he was Artistic Director of the Companhia de Danca de Lisboa, one of Portugal’s first publicly-funded modern dance companies. There, he created 8 dances for the company, and commissioned 10 premieres, extensively touring Portugal, along with performances also in Spain, and Italy.

Haim has been commissioned to create new works for many dance companies notably the Nederlands Dans Theater, Ballet Frankfurt, the Limon Dance Company, Whim w’Him and has restaged his works for The Joffrey Ballet, the Bat-Dor Dance Company of Israel, Yabin and Friends, and the Juilliard Dance Ensemble, among others. Since 2002, he has been guest choreographer at The Wooden Floor, an after school organization in Santa Ana, CA that has promised hope and opportunity to nearly 400 low-income youth annually.

His 80-minute solo, "The Goldberg Variations," created between 1994 and 1997, received its world premiere at the American Dance Festival. It has also been presented at the Danspace Project in St. Mark's Church in New York, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, On The Boards in Seattle, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Munye Theater in Seoul, S. Korea, the Theater for the Young Spectator in Ekaterinburg, Russia, and at over 25 theaters scattered around the U.S. It was also on the performance roster of the Lincoln Center Institute from 2000-2002 and has been on the roster of sister educational institutes in Albany, Rochester and Utica, NY. He recently reprised this work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

His full evening work for 14 Seattle performers, This Land Is Your Land, opened the 2013 ArtDanThe Festival in Paris, was part of the 2013 American Dance Festival at the Nasher Museum of Art, and was performed at the Joyce Theater in NYC as part of the 2014 Focus Dance Festival.

Haim was Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle (2002-2008), Visiting Associate Professor at Reed College, and has been on the faculties of the American Dance Festival and NYU-Tisch School of the Arts. He has also taught at the North Carolina School of the Arts, Ohio University, University of Illinois, the New World School of the Arts, Hollins University, Cornell University, the Rotterdamse Dansacademie, Dance Space and Peridance in New York City, and has been guest-teacher at schools and companies in Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Holland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Poland, Russia, and Japan. He is currently on the faculty of the Velocity Dance Center and the International Ballet Academy.

He is a recipient of a 1987 NYFA Choreographers Fellowship, a 1988 and 1996 NEA Choreographers Fellowship and grants from the NPN Suitcase Fund, ArtsLink, Inc., the Harkness Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and The Seattle Office for Arts and Cultural Affairs. He was awarded the Scripps/ADF Humphrey- Weidman-Limon Fellowship for Choreography and was a Fulbright Senior Specialist.

Haim is a visiting faculty member in the BFA Dance Lab at Bennington for Spring 2026.

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