David Dawson (London, 1972) began his professional dance career after graduating from the Royal Ballet School in 1991, performing with companies including Birmingham Royal Ballet (1991), English National Ballet (1994), Het Nationale Ballet (1995), and William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt (2000). From 2002 onwards, he has focused entirely on choreography. His first major choreographic work was A Million Kisses to My Skin (2000), created for Het Nationale Ballet at the invitation of Wayne Eagling. His choreography The Grey Area (2002), also for Het Nationale Ballet, earned him the Benois de la Danse. In 2004, he created 00:00 for Het Nationale Ballet, which was named Best New Ballet by Dance Europe magazine. In 2005, he was invited, on a rare occasion, by the Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet to create Reverence. Between 2004 and 2009, Dawson was a resident guest choreographer at Het Nationale Ballet and Semperoper Ballet (Dresden).

Since 2010, he has been a resident guest choreographer with the Royal Ballet of Flanders and works as a freelance choreographer, based in Berlin. His other works include Morning Ground, Das Verschwundene | The Disappeared, A Sweet Spell of Oblivion, On the Nature of Daylight, and The World According to Us. For The Gentle Chapters, a work created for Het Nationale Ballet, he was nominated for a Gouden Zwaan, the highest dance award in the Netherlands. His recent works include The Third Light and dancingmadlybackwards. He also created a reimagining of Faun(e) for the Diaghilev Festival at English National Ballet (London). In the spring of 2012, he created a new work for the Present/s program at Het Nationale Ballet.

To date, Dawson has created nearly twenty ballets. His work is included in the repertoire of almost all leading ballet companies worldwide.