Choreographer, dancer and interdisciplinary curator. She holds a B.A. in Dance from Columbia University and an MFA in Dance from Hollins University. As artistic director of her NY based dance troupe between 2000-2003, The Red Hill Project, she has created works that showcased at various venues across the US and Canada.

Since moving to Israel, she has been teaching, giving workshops and choreographing for the Batsheva Dance Ensemble, OtherDance Festival, IntimaDance Festival, International Exposure, Curtain Up Festival and Dance Arena festival, to name a few.

Ruttenberg seeks to create works that engage all the senses, not excluding the sense of humor, and to expand the existing audiences for dance. To that aim, she collaborates with artists from different fields (theater, film, music and visual art), and examines new angles for the presentation and experience of dance. In 2014, she succeeded in making 2000 audience members move as one at the world’s largest Pecha Kucha event. Her latest works (Dream Team, 60,000 Gra(ha)m, Everything Must Go and I’m All Ears) travel through personal, artistic and even institutional archives, to intertwine past and future, truth and fiction, to make new and alive orders and possibilities out of those.

Ruttenberg continues to produce and present her own work in Israel and abroad. Her Dance-Films Private I's and Glove Story (Director: Oren Shkedy) have screened internationally and have won Outstanding film Award at the Jumping Frames Festival, the Audience Choice Award at Dance Camera West and first prize at the Tallahassee International Competition, among others. ScreensArt, a series of dance art works for the screen, premiered at Fresh Paint in Tel Aviv and exhibited at the Miami Art Week 2012 and in Art Brussels in 2015. A solo exhibition of Ruttenberg and Shkedy’s dance-based video art works, CUT! premiered at Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv, and showcased at Art Miami.

Dana is the founder and artistic director of Project 48 Dance, now entering its 14th year, a creative blind-date adventure which brings in over 40 artists to create original dance works in two 24 hour rounds, in collaboration with Batsheva Dance Company and various stages worldwide. She is the founder and curator of Studio Visits, a series of intimate encounters with choreographers and their work-in-progress, open to the public. She served as artistic director of Curtain Up Festival, Israel’s largest festival for new dance works.

Dana continues to create choreography for various Theater and TV productions, teach and perform. She served on faculty at The Kibbutz College Dance Department, Hakvutza Program and Hasadna Professional Dance Program. 

She is the winner of the Minister of Culture Award as well as the distinguished Rosenblum Award.