Dana Gingras

Artistic Director @Animals Of Distinction

CA

Dana Gingras is a choreographer, filmmaker, performer and teacher. Her 27-year career has moved across mediums and artistic practices and has established her has a game-changing, boundary-pushing artist. Gingras is drawn to amplifying the sense of physical possibility, what bodies are capable of and allowing that to become manifold and present in the most innovative fashion possible. She has worked on collaborations with cultural icons like William Gibson and Jenny Holzer. Musical collaborators include underground legends like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, The Tindersticks, Warren Ellis, The Tiger Lillies, Roger Tellier-Craig (Fly Pan Am, Le Révélateur), Steve Severin of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Japanese avant-garde duo group A. Multi-media works have been co-created with animators, programmers and 3D motion designers James Paterson, Amit Pitaru, Josh Sherrett and with director Vincent Morriset for the award winning interactive music video Sprawl II for Arcade Fire. In 2006 Dana formed Animals of Distinction. The work of AOD has been presented nationally and internationally across many different platforms including live performance, film, design, visual art and new media. In 2017 Dana Gingras/Animals of Distinction was granted the long-term residency at the CCOV (Le Centre de Création O Vertigo) at Montreal’s Place des Arts and through this she produced a new large-scale work Frontera for 10 dancers featuring live original music by Fly Pan Am and lighting and scenography by UK based United Visual Artists. The work premiered in November 2019 at the Grand Théâtre de Québec and was subsequently performed in Montreal at Theatre Maisonneuve, Sydney Festival, CTM Berlin, PuSh Festival and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa where Gingras is a long term associate artist.