who i am
Performing / Creating / Teaching
Victoria performs, teaches dance, and creates body-based art that is grounded in relationality, curiosity and empathy while integrating diverse perspectives and light-hearted approaches.
Bio
Born and raised in northern California, Victoria has always been moving, creating, and connecting. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Dance from Belhaven University in 2008 and afterward worked in the freelance scene in the Pacific Northwest of the United States for 6 years. Since 2015, she has been living in Berlin and working in Europe.
Collaboration has always been important to Victoria’s work and informs how she creates as well as performs. Developing her own work and choreography, she has collaborated with musicians Ruth Kemna and Joshua Tennent, performer Rodolfo Piazza Pfitscher da Silva to create pieces such as Arising//Passing, Signs.Sigils, and Playing Dead and Doing Time. She has an ongoing creative partnership with actress, puppeteer, director Nathalie Wendt. Together they created a queer theatrical comedy project, The Heroine Show, with live and film performances. She is a founding member of FREYAS collective. While in the US, she worked with artists and musicians such as Alana O Rogers, musician Julia Massey, and Kenaniah Bystrom.
As a dancer, Victoria has performed in Europe for Irina Pauls, Sommer Ulrickson, Joachim Schloemer, Tanz Company Gervasi, Sara Angius, and the Staatsoper Berlin among others. She has also acted and danced in film and tv productions such as "Liebesdings” (2022), “Babylon Berlin” (2016, 2021) or “Berlin, I Love You” (2017) and the occasional commercial. While in Seattle from 2009-2015 she performed with many artists including Catapult Dance/Michele Miller, Ilvs Strauss, Alana O Rogers Dance Company, Tara Dyberg, and Coriolis Dance Collective to name a few.
Engaging in other modalities of co-creation, Victoria curates dance-based events and teaches movement classes. Through ada Studio in Berlin, she has curated for the series “NAH DRAN extended" in 2018, 2019 and a residency-performance version of NAH DRAN in 2020. While in the Seattle she had the opportunity to coproduce dance & art events through the cultural nonprofit Abbey Arts between 2012 and 2014. Teaching dance is a vital part of Victoria’s continuing artistic practice and since 2009 she has been teaching contemporary, ballet, improvisation and jazz and is happy to be a staff teacher at Tanzfabrik Berlin as well as a freelance teacher.
Acknowledgements
The practice of contemporary dance and dance-making is dynamic, fluid and continually evolving with influences from many sources. I want to honor and acknowledge the teachers and mentors who directly formed me and especially those who indirectly shaped me by their contribution to contemporary and modern dance. Thank you to those teachers, choreographers and dance pioneers who came from POC and Indigenous heritage or because of their gender and sexuality, who often have not or do not receive the recognition they are due.
I respectfully acknowledge I grew up on traditional Nisenan Land in California as well as having lived and worked on Duwamish/Suquamish Land in Seattle, Washington USA.
Questioning my own sexuality and acknowledging it’s fluidity, I position myself as an ally of the entire LGBTQIA+ community and consider myself and lifestyle choices as queer or queering.