[1] Hay's signature slow and minimal dance style was informed by a trip to Japan while touring with Merce Cunningham's company in 1964.
[3] In October 1966 Hay (along with other artists) worked with Bell Labs computer experts in collaborative performances that led to 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering.
This Bell Lab collaboration also led to the creation of a seminal piece of computer art that involved Hay: Ken Knowlton and Leon Harmon's "Studies in Perception #1".
In 1976 Hay moved from Vermont to Austin, Texas, where she began developing a set of choreographic practices she called playing awake.
In 1994 her second book, Lamb at the Altar: The Story of a Dance (Duke University Press), Hay documents the unique creative process that defined these playing awake works.
A one hour documentary film about Solo Performance Commissioning Projects titled Turn Your F*^king Head was made by Becky Edmunds in 2012.
In Paris, The Festival d’Automne presented Hay's "The Match" in 2005, “O, O” in 2006, and "If I Sing To You" in 2008, which was commissioned by The Forsythe Company and toured extensively in Europe and Australia.
Perception Unfolds: Looking at Deborah Hay's Dance then travelled to the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2015 Hay, in collaboration with Laurie Anderson and lighting designer Minna Tikkainen, created a long work called "Figure a Sea" for twenty one dancers that was commissioned by the Cullberg Ballet in Stockholm, Sweden.
In 2016 Hay presented dances at the University of California, Los Angeles's Center for the Art of Performances' Freud Playhouse.