Amanda Acorn

Artist

Amanda Acorn is a dance artist, researcher and choreographer currently based in Toronto, Canada. Her practice includes somatic movement, improvisation, writing, and drawing as tools to explore the body as an empathetic and malleable system, wired for attunement.

As a dancer, she performed in and collaborated on projects as a company dancer with Dancemakers (2011-2016) and independently with choreographers such as Dana Michel (QC), Isabel Lewis (DE), Lemi Ponifasio (NZ), Andrea Spaziani (CA) and Benjamin Kamino (CA) among others.

As a choreographer, she creates intimate, sensorial encounters and responsive environments for shared, embodied exchange. Her latest project, no place (2022), explores the body in dialogue with the material world through emergent, relational practice and an evolving construction of space and place.

She graduated from the Canadian College of Performing Arts (2000) and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre’s Professional Training Program (2008) and pursued independent studies in Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin and Genoa, Italy. Her solo and group works have included presentations and commissions shared in diverse venues in Toronto including Toronto Dance Theatre, Videofag, The Citadel, Luminato Festival, among others, and across Canada at the Festival TransAmériques in Montréal, Workers Arts Heritage Centre in Hamilton, Festival of New Dance in St John’s, Dancer’s Studio West in Calgary, Push Festival and Gold Saucer Studio in Vancouver.

She holds an MA from York University and is studying Gestalt Psychotherapy at the Gestalt Institute of Toronto.