Lilja Rúriksdóttir: Juilliard Dancer, Aaron Moten’s Wife

Quick answer: Lilja Rúriksdóttir is an Icelandic dancer, choreographer, and actress who in 2009 became the first Icelandic dancer accepted into The Juilliard School, per choreographer Jonah Bokaer’s official artist roster. She later choreographed an episode of L.A. Dance Project’s Marfa Dance Episodes and picked up screen credits including Aska and Bad Child: Rouge. She’s married to Fallout actor Aaron Moten, with whom she has three daughters.

Most of what’s published about her treats that marriage as the headline and her dance career as a footnote. The record actually runs the other way — she built a documented, decade-long career in New York’s contemporary dance world before Moten’s Fallout casting made her name a search term.

The Juilliard Milestone, Sourced

The clearest, most specific fact about Rúriksdóttir comes not from a tabloid but from the roster page of choreographer Jonah Bokaer, who has worked with her professionally since 2013. According to that page, Rúriksdóttir moved to New York in 2008 to study at The Joffrey Ballet School, and in 2009 became the first Icelandic dancer accepted into The Juilliard School. The same page credits her with performing works by choreographers including José Limón, Martha Graham, and Ohad Naharin, and says she received the Hector Zaraspe Prize for choreography upon graduating from Juilliard. EverybodyWikiEverybodyWiki

That “first Icelandic dancer at Juilliard” detail isn’t just Bokaer’s framing. A 2013 Dance Enthusiast writeup covering a Janis Brenner & Dancers program independently describes her the same way, identifying her as the first Icelandic dancer to attend Juilliard, where she met Brenner in 2011. Icelandic outlet Vísir covered her Juilliard graduation directly in a May 2013 piece — a detail that shows up in secondary sourcing but which we haven’t been able to fetch and quote firsthand. Cai

After Juilliard, the trail doesn’t go cold. The Bokaer page lists ongoing work with his company from 2013 onward, plus collaborations with Joanna Mendl Shaw’s Equus Projects, Janis Brenner & Dancers, and the DASH Ensemble, and a credit in Charlie Wan’s dance film Lean on Me.

The Marfa Credit That Sets Her Apart

The strongest evidence that she’s a working choreographer, not just a trained dancer, is on L.A. Dance Project’s own site. The company’s official repertory page for its 2017 Marfa Dance Episodes — a four-part series filmed on-site at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, live-streamed to an audience the company says topped 500,000 viewers — credits Episode 3 to Rúriksdóttir, alongside episodes choreographed by company founder Benjamin Millepied. BiliumNews

She wasn’t just choreographing from the wings, either. A 2017 review from the New York arts blog This Week in New York names her among the dancers performing in LADP’s Joyce Theater program that year, including Millepied’s Orpheus Highway and a staging of Merce Cunningham’s MinEvent — solid confirmation she was an active company member, not a guest credit.

Documented artistic milestones

What’s Also Confirmed: The Career Beyond Dance

Her talent agency, Creative Artists Iceland, describes her as a bilingual actress eligible to work in both the U.S. and EU, trained additionally at Anthony Meindl’s Actor Workshop and the Margie Haber Acting Studio, and holding a bachelor’s degree in psychology. That agency page is the source for her listed screen work — Bad Child: Rouge and Aska, both from 2021 — which IMDb independently corroborates. The agency also lists her as currently based between Los Angeles and Reykjavík.

The Aaron Moten Connection — And What’s Genuinely Confirmed About It

Rúriksdóttir is married to Aaron Moten, who plays Maximus on Prime Video’s Fallout. Multiple outlets reporting on the show’s second season, including AOL’s coverage of the cast’s real-life partners, describe the couple sharing three daughters and say they relocated from Reykjavík to Los Angeles around May 2025, based on one of Rúriksdóttir’s own Instagram posts. In a December 2025 GQ interview, Moten talked about the move, explaining that after five years in Iceland, the family shifted to Los Angeles because that’s where filming had moved. He also referenced his three daughters directly when discussing the logistics of transatlantic family life.

Coverage tied to a 2024 interview Moten and Rúriksdóttir gave Icelandic outlet MBL.is describes them meeting at Juilliard, where he studied acting and she studied dance and choreography — consistent with her documented 2009–2013 window at the school.

What’s Not Verified — and Shouldn’t Be Reported as Fact

Her exact birth date circulates online (August 27, 1991) via an EverybodyWiki entry that’s explicitly marked as an unaccepted Wikipedia draft, not a verified encyclopedia page — treat that date as unconfirmed. Her children’s names, her precise net worth, and details of her early childhood dance training in Iceland also don’t trace back to a source solid enough to print as fact, despite showing up repeatedly across lower-quality aggregator sites that appear to be recycling each other’s claims rather than original reporting.

The Bottom Line

Strip away the “celebrity spouse” framing and what’s left is a fairly unusual dance biography: a teenager who left Iceland for New York, became the first dancer from her country ever accepted to Juilliard, won a choreography prize on graduation, and a few years later got her own episode credit in a site-specific dance series that pulled half a million live viewers. The marriage to Aaron Moten is real and documented — but it’s the second interesting thing about her, not the first.

Sources

• Jonah Bokaer — Performers roster
• L.A. Dance Project — Marfa Dance Episodes repertory page
• Creative Artists Iceland — Lilja Rúriksdóttir profile
• IMDb — Lilja Rúriksdóttir
• Dance Enthusiast — Janis Brenner feature (2013)
• This Week in New York — L.A. Dance Project at the Joyce
• AOL — Meet Lilja Rúriksdóttir, Aaron Moten’s Wife and Mother of Their Daughters
• AOL — Real-Life Partners of the Fallout Cast

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