Jo Parkes is a freelance choreographer based in Berlin and the UK. She creates work for public spaces. The casts of professional and non-professional performers vary with each piece and often contain performers with an autobiographical connection to the place for which the piece is created. She has created work for groups in the UK, Germany, USA, Canada, Ethiopia and Cambodia and taught internationally for 15 years. Since 2011, Jo co-artistic directs (with Fiona Edwards) In-Company, an ensemble of dancers aged 20-75 based in Berlin. She is responsible for project development at TanzZeit – a programme, which places contemporary dance artists in Berlin schools, where she supports a pool of 40 artists in 50 school classes per year.

In 2011, Jo was commissioned to create a piece to close the official ceremony marking 50 years since the building of the Berlin Wall, which was broadcast live across Germany and around the world. In 2009, Jo’s project Postcards from Berlin won a Kinder zum Olymp award. In 2002, she was the recipient of the Bonnie Bird New Choreography Award (GB). She is a Fulbright scholar, with a first-class degree in English/German literature from Oxford University and a Master of Fine Arts in choreography from the University of California, Los Angeles (World Arts and Cultures Program) where she studied with Victoria Marks, David Rousseve and Peter Sellars.

www.mobiledance.org