Joanna Kotze is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, dancer and educator who has been part of the New York dance community since 1998. She creates highly physical dance performances through a collaborative, multi-disciplinary process, presenting ways to look at effort, labor, humor, violence, unpredictability, and beauty through movement as well as the body’s relationship to sound, light, physical materials and space. 

Joanna was recently named the New York Live Arts 2025/2026 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She received a 2024 Grant to Artists from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the 2013 New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer after premiering her piece It happened it had happened it is happening it will happen, and her 2018 evening-length work, What will we be like when we get there, was nominated for a Bessie Award for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design by collaborator Ryan Seaton. Her work has also been supported by the Nathan M. Clark Foundation, City Artist Corps, New Music USA, the Jerome Foundation, Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, Harkness Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts BUILD, Brooklyn Arts Council, Yellowhouse, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Her choreography has been presented by UtahPresents, the American Dance Festival, Wanås Konst Sculpture Park in Sweden, New York Live Arts, The Irondale Center, The Yard, Bates Dance Festival, Stonington Opera House, The Wexner Center, Velocity Dance Center, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Danspace Project, American Dance Institute, Bard College, Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out, Dance New Amsterdam, Roulette, Dixon Place, 92nd Street Y, WAXworks, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and other venues and galleries.

Joanna recently completed a Pillow Lab residency at Jacob’s Pillow, where she worked on her new evening-length piece, this is the beginning, this is the end, with five other dancers, two musicians, and a writer in residence. She has an upcoming five-week solo residency at Loghaven in fall 2025. Her last evening-length piece, ‘lectric Eye, premiered at The Space at Irondale, in Brooklyn, New York, in February 2022, was reprised at New York Live Arts Live Artery in January 2023, and toured to the American Dance Festival in Durham, North Carolina and UtahPresents in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her large cast, outdoor dance, BIG BEATS, has been set on six casts in six different communities and continues to others in the near future. Her ongoing virtual project, LONG DISTANCE DANCE DIALOGUES, engages with and connects dancers/choreographers around the world through interviews and a movement relay. From 2020-2022 she created a short film project called Nothing’s changed except for everything with Tallahassee-based filmmaker, Chris Cameron, and New York-Based composer, Ryan Seaton, and collaborated with writer Lauren Slone on a book that includes observations, reflections and creative writing about the process of making ‘lectric Eye.

Joanna has also had residency support from the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC)Milvus Artistic Research Center, Wanås Konst, the Alan M. Kriegsmann Creative Residency, Dance Program Malmö, Exploring the Metropolis, The Bogliasco Foundation, The Yard, New York Live Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Movement Research, The 92nd Street Y, Jacob’s Pillow, Bennington College, Sedona Arts Center, Marble House Project, The Camargo Foundation, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and Djerassi. She has had commissions to create new works on Gibney Dance Company, Toronto Dance Theatre, Ririe-Woodbury, Zenon Dance, and the James Sewell Ballet and has created original works on students at The Ailey School, University of the Arts, Barnard, The New School, Purchase, Long Island University, Ohio University, Southern Utah University and Miami University. 

Joanna currently dances for Kimberly Bartosik/daela (2009-present) and Stacy Spence, and has worked with Wally Cardona (2000-2010, 2018), Annie-B Parson, Donna Uchizono, Tendayi Kuumba, Kota Yamazaki, Netta Yerushalmy, Sam Kim, Sarah Skaggs, Christopher Williams, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, Daniel Charon, Nina Winthrop and others. She is on teaching faculty at Movement Research and has taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Amherst College, Melbourne University, Toronto Dance Theatre, The Ailey School, Gibney Dance, Sarah Lawrence College, University of the Arts, Barnard College, NYU’s Tisch and Experimental Theater Wing, The New School, LIU, Southern Utah University, Ohio University, Miami University, The Field Center, Salt Dance Fest, Bates Dance Festival, and the American Dance Festival. She is originally from South Africa and has a BA in Architecture from Miami University. joannakotze.com