Dana Michel

Dana Michel is a live artist based in Montreal, Canada. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary. Her artistic practice is rooted in exploring identity as disordered multiplicity. She works with notions of performative alchemy and post-cultural bricolage, using live moments, object appropriation, personal history, future desires and current preoccupations to create an empathetic centrifuge of experience between her and her witnesses. Before graduating from the BFA program in Contemporary Dance at Concordia University in her late twenties, she was a marketing executive, and a competitive runner and football player. Since 2012 she created solo performance works including Yellow Towel, Palna Easy Francis, Mercurial George, Cutlass Spring and MIKE. In 2014 she was awarded the ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments, and was highlighted among notable female choreographers of the year by the New York Times. In 2017 she was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2018  she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Canada. In 2019 she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art at Kuopio, Finland. In 2022, the Canada Council for The Arts awarded her the Jacqueline-Lemieux prize in recognition of her contribution to dance in Canada.