Michael Kliën
Michael Kliën is a choreographer and artist whose work has been situated around the world. Kliën’s artistic practice encompasses interdisciplinary thinking, critical writing, curatorial projects, and, centrally, choreographic works equally at home in the Performing as well as the Fine Arts. He has been commissioned by leading institutions such as Ballett Frankfurt, Martha Graham Dance Company, New Museum, PS122, Volksoper Wien, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hayward Gallery, and ZKM. As Artistic Director/CEO of Daghdha (2003—2011, Ireland), Kliën developed a distinct movement aesthetic as well as influential concepts of politically engaged choreography, performance, and dance. He received a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. After living and working in Greece, he was appointed Professor at Duke University in 2017, inaugural director of the MFA in Dance: Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis in 2018, and director of the Laboratory for Social Choreography at the Kenan Institute of Ethics in 2020.
Research Interest
Social Choreography permeates the tightly knit fabric of socialization, for other potential realities to be sensed and experienced, and for new relational fields amongst human and non-human to be forged. The practice of Social Choreography deals with the uncovering of underlying social relations and patterns – the choreography of the social – through embodied practices, and always, engages these dynamics for new social choreographies to emerge simultaneously.