ANNA-LISE MARIE HEARN

Dance Artist • Choreographer • Movement Director • Dance Educator • Artist Coach • Choreographic Coach

Anna-Lise Marie Hearn (she/her) is a British-Norwegian dance artist, choreographer, educator, facilitator, and artist coach based in Oslo. Her work lives in the spaces between facilitation, creation, and artistic research. She centres movement and the body— not only through form,but through the processes that shape it.

Anna-Lise has worked extensively as an educator and facilitator within the dance field in the UK, Germany, and Norway, designing and delivering workshops, professional training programmes, and practice-led processes for artists and students. Her work focuses on creating experiences and spaces that are enriching, exploratory, expansive, and responsive – where participants can research, test, reflect, and develop their work with support and clarity.

With over 15 years of extensive teaching and facilitation experience, Anna-Lise has worked with professional dancers, in professional dance education, pre-professional training, youth dance and community dance, teaching dance improvisation, composition, and contemporary dance. As an educator and facilitator, her practice centres on nurturing individual and collective artistic development and creative expression.

Anna-Lise has developed Toolboks, a card-based resource and creative tool for movement improvisation, composition, and creative processes. Toolboks emerged from a desire to support artists in finding new pathways and possibilities within their creative processes — independently and within collective environments. Toolboks is a physical, tactile, card-based resource designed to invite inquiry and exploration, shift perspectives, challenge habitual patterns, and offer new possibilities of entering, developing, and thinking about movement – and the processes we engage with when creating.

Movement improvisation plays an important role within Anna-Lise’s creative process as it fosters an approach to creating work that promotes generosity and deeper research and allows for spontaneity and visceral, bodily reactions to the material she is working with. Anna-Lise has a growing interest in improvisational methods and systems that can facilitate creation and artistic development, which she integrates into her choreographic processes as well as her teaching and facilitation work.

Anna-Lise’s choreographic work has spanned collaborative projects, commissioned work, large-scale and intimate productions within both live performance (stage, site-specific, outdoor, alternative performance spaces) and film (dance film, conceptual, commercial, fashion, music video). Working with dance and movement, and often interlaced with other artistic influences, she creates experiences and spaces that allow for connection and transformation, for something to shift.

Anna-Lise creates work that draws connections to the personal, societal, poetic, and metaphorical. Fascinated by the things that make us human, how we relate to ourselves, to one another, and to the environments we move through, her work translates these nuanced relationships into visual and visceral experiences. Moving between tangible and intangible, and navigating the delicate balance between inner and outer, she is interested in how these experiences are held in the body and how they are expressed outwards.

Supporting artists both inside and outside the studio, Anna-Lise also works as an artist coach and choreographic coach. She offers personalised one-to-one and group coaching for those working in, entering into, or connected with the creative and artistic industries.

“Where are all the female choreographers? Right here! This lady is mark-making her way and leaving deep grooves in the dance world - great work!”

— Sonia York-Pryce, Visual Artist & Photographer

“I was, from the outset, struck by Anna-Lise’s sensitive, intelligent, searching approach to the choreographic process. She displayed a natural gift for being able to draw the best from her dancers whilst equally staying open to external input and ideas. Her careful, thoughtful application and attention to detail were very much in evidence. The dancers clearly loved working with her and the piece which emerged was accomplished, fascinating and engaging.

Anna-Lise’s creative drive and her passion for dance are inspiring to be around. She has a very special gift where people-skills are concerned and also has, along the way, developed excellent administrative and management skills.”

— Christopher Benstead, Composer & Music Director