Joanna Cook (she/her) is a dance artist, researcher, and multimodal choreographer based in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa. Her practice moves across choreography, sound, voice, video, printmaking, installation, and expanded book forms, engaging feminist methodologies grounded in care, co-labour, and material kinship. She develops immersive structures that unfold through relational composition, ecological attention, and slow, processual making. Joanna is currently completing a PhD in Dance Studies at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland), where she teaches in the Dance Studies program and facilitates professional open classes through the Collaborative Dance Class, a structure she developed. She is Research Assistant for Dancing In/Dancing with the Digital and the Creative Pedagogies Network, and co-directs Vector, a platform for site-responsive, digitally mediated choreography with Becca Weber and Danielle Lottridge. Her recent works include Spooling Womxn, (il)legible inkscription (with Steve Lovett), Expanding (Practices of) Flesh, C//ourage, Fragments of Silent Skin, and 3R (with Janaina Moraes). These projects activate choreography as a site of trace, pressure, and porous relation—where cloth, ink, language, and gesture co-compose through touch, repetition, and speculative legibility. Joanna regularly presents her research through lecture-demonstrations, workshops, and creative-critical publications. Her writing spans artistic research, feminist performance theory, and creative pedagogy, contributing to both scholarly and practice-led contexts. She is committed to multimodal knowledge practices that cultivate co-labour, distributed authorship, and situated attention. Her work contributes to feminist resistance, choreographic experimentation, and the shaping of tender(e) ecologies through practices of re:pair, (at)tending, and care.
Symposium
LACE #3: Materialising Touch
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she/her
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deep dive host